the public (notably of
that portion of the public under the age of ten years that attended St.
Bridget's Parochial School) he full well knew that his efforts through
all these years to make, in New York, lebkuchen such as he himself had
eaten when he was a boy, at home in Nuernberg, had been neither more nor
less than a long series of failures.

In the hopeful days of his apprenticeship all had seemed so easy before
him. Let him but have a little shop, and then a little capital wherewith
to lay in his supply of honey, and the thing would be done! He had
no recipe, it is true; for he was a baker not by heredity, but by
selection. Yet from a wise old baker he had gleaned the knowledge of
honey-cake making, and he believed strongly that from the pure fount of
his own genius he could draw a formula for the making of lebkuchen
so excellent that compared with it all other lebkuchen would seem
tasteless. But these were the bright dreams of youth, which age had
refused to realize.

In course of time the little shop became an accomplished fact; a very
little shop it was in East Fourth Street. Capital came more slowly, and
three several times, when a sum almost sufficient had been saved, was
it diverted from its destined purpose of buying the honey without which
Gottlieb could not make even a beginning in his triumphal lebkuchen
career.

His first accumulation was swept away through the conquest of Ambition
by Love. In this case Love was personified in one Minna Schaus--who was
not by any means a typical sturdy German lass, with laughing looks and
stalwart ways, but a daintily-finished, golden-haired maiden, with soft
blue eyes full of tenderness, and a gentleness of manner that Gottlieb
thought--and with more reason than lovers sometimes think things of this
sort--was very like the manner of an angel. And for love of her Gottlieb
forgot for a while his high resolves in regard to lebkuchen making;
and on the altar of his affections--in part to pay for his modest
wedding-feast, in part to pay for the modest outfit for their
housekeeping over the bakery--the money laid aside for the filling of
his honey-pots very willingly was offered up.

A second time were his honey-pots sacrificed, that the coming into
the world of the little Minna might be made smooth. This, also, was a
willing sacrifice; though in his heart of hearts Gottlieb felt a twinge
of regret that his first-born was not a son, to whom the fame and
fortune incident