the spot.

It was rather dashing to Gottlieb's enthusiasm, however, that his
assistant--thereby manifesting a shrewd worldly wisdom--declined
immediately to impart his secret. He would make all the lebkuchen that
was required, he said, but for the present he need not tell how it was
made--possibly the Herr Brekel might not be satisfied with it, after
all. But the Herr Brekel was satisfied with it, and so was all the
neighborhood when the first batch of lebkuchen was baked and placed on
sale. Indeed, as the fame of this delicious lebkuchen went abroad, the
coming of the new baker was accepted by all Germans with discriminating
palates as one of the most important events that ever had occurred on
the East Side. The work of the young man who drove the bread-wagon was
so greatly increased that he organized a strike, uniting in his own
person the several functions of strikers, walking delegates, district
assembly, and executive committee. And when the strike collapsed--that
is to say, when the young man was discharged summarily--Gottlieb really
did find it necessary to hire two new young men, and to buy an extra
horse and wagon. Morally speaking, therefore (although the original
young man, who remained out of employment for several weeks, and had
a pretty hard time of it, did not think so), the strike was a complete
success.

As a matter of course no well-set-up, right-thinking young fellow of
three-and-twenty could go on baking lebkuchen in the same bakery with
Minna Brekel for any length of time without falling in love with her.
Nor was it reasonable to suppose that even Minna, who had treated casual
apprentices and wagon-driving young men with a seemly scorn, would
continue to sit in the seat of the scornful when siege in form was laid
to her heart by a properly ruddy-cheeked and blue-eyed assistant baker,
whose skill was such that he could make lebkuchen fit to be eaten by the
German portion of the saints in Paradise. At the end of three months
the feelings of these young people towards each other were quite clearly
defined in their own minds; at the end of six months, as they were
sitting together one afternoon in the little back room at a time when
the shop happened to be empty, things came to the pleasing crisis that
they both for a considerable period had foreseen.

But then, unfortunately, came a storm--that neither of them had foreseen
at all--that shook the Cafe Nuernberg to its very foundations!

Gottlieb w