ke; and he knew that when fortune favored him at last, as he
still believed that fortune would favor him, he would have in store such
honey-cake as would enable him to make lebkuchen fit to be eaten by the
Kaiser himself!

After the affair of the broken peel there was a coolness between
Gottlieb and the elder apprentice, which, increasing, led to a positive
coldness, and then to a separation. And then it was that Fate put a
large spoke in all the wheels which ran in the Cafe Nuernberg by bringing
into Gottlieb's employment a ruddy young Nuernberger, lately come out of
that ancient city to America, named Hans Kuhn.

It was not chance that led Hans to earn his living in a bakery when he
came to New York. He was a born baker: a baker by choice, by force of
natural genius, by hereditary right. Back in the dusk of the Middle
Ages, as far as ever the traditions of his family and the records of
the Guild of Bakers of Nuernberg ran, all the men of his race had been
bakers, and famous ones at that. A cumulative destiny to bake was upon
him, and he loved baking with all his heart. It was no desire to abandon
his craft that had led him to leave Nuernberg and cross the ocean;
rather was he moved by a noble ambition to build up on a broad and sure
foundation the noble art of baking in the New World. And it had chanced,
moreover, that in the conscription he had drawn an unlucky number.

When this young man entered the Cafe Nuernberg--being drawn thither by
its display of the name of his own native city--and asked for a job, his
air was so frank, his talk about baking so intelligent, that Gottlieb
took kindly to him at once; and Minna, sitting demurely at her accounts
in the little wire cage over which was a fine tin sign inscribed in
golden letters with the word "Cashier," was mightily well pleased, in a
demure and proper way, at sight of his ruddy cheeks and bushy shock of
light-brown hair and little yellow mustache and honest blue eyes. When
he told, in answer to Gottlieb's questions, that he was the grandson of
the very baker in Nuernberg whose delicious lebkuchen Gottlieb had eaten
when he was a boy, and that a part of his bakerly equipment was the
lebkuchen recipe that had come down in his family from the baker genius,
his remote ancestor, who had invented it--well, when he had told this
much about himself, it is not surprising that Gottlieb fairly jumped for
joy, and engaged him, not as his apprentice, but as his assistant, on