nued failure of his attempts to make a really excellent lebkuchen,
he would have been a very happy man. By this time he had come to be a
baker of ease. The hard part of the work was done by the apprentices,
and the morning delivery of bread was attended to by the young man who
drove the bread-wagon. In the summer-time he would take Minna and
Aunt Hedwig, always accompanied by her faithful Herr Sohnstein, upon
beer-drinking expeditions to Guttenberg and other fashionable suburban
resorts; and through the cozy winter evenings he smoked his long pipe
comfortably in the little room at the back of the shop, where Minna and
Aunt Hedwig sat with him, and where Herr Sohnstein, also smoking a long
pipe, usually sat with him too. Sometimes Minna would sing sweet German
songs to them, accompanying herself very creditably upon a cabinet
organ--for Minna had received not only the substantial education that
enabled her to keep the bakery accounts, but also had been instructed
in the polite accomplishments of music and the dance. In summer, when
expeditions were not on foot, these smoking parties usually were held
upon the roof; where Gottlieb had made a garden and grew roses in pots,
and even had raised some rare and delicious cauliflowers.

It was a pleasant place, that roof, of a warm summer evening, especially
when the rising full-moon sent a shimmering path of glory across the
rippling waters of the East River, and cast over the bad-smelling region
of Hunter's Point a glamour of golden haze that made it seem, oil tanks
and all, a bit of fairy-land. At such times, as they sat among the
rose-bushes and cauliflowers, Herr Sohnstein not infrequently would stop
smoking his long pipe while he slyly squeezed Aunt Hedwig's plump hand.
And Gottlieb also would stop smoking, as his thoughts wandered away
along that glittering path across the waters, and so up to heaven where
his Minna was. And then his thoughts would return to earth, to his
little Minna--for to him she still was but a child--and he would find
his sorrow lessened in thankfulness that, while his greatest treasure
was lost to him, this good daughter and so many other good things still
were his.

But the lebkuchen dream of Gottlieb's youth remained unrealized; still
unattained was the goal that twenty years before had seemed so near.
However, being a stout-hearted baker of the solid Nuernberg strain,
he did not at all surrender hope. Each year he added to his stock of
honey-ca