course of time, relations of warm friendliness. Of his kin only two
cousins were left; for the rich, good uncle, from overmuch eating of his
own delicatessen, had come to a bilious ending; and his uncle's widow,
wise in her generation, had returned to her native town in Saxony, where
she was enabled, by reason of the fortune that the delicatessen-shop had
brought to her, to outshine the local baroness, and presently to attain
the summit of her highest hopes and happiness by wedding an impoverished
local baron, and so becoming a baroness herself. Her two sons were well
pleased with this marriage. They were carrying on a great business
in hog products, and had purchased for themselves fine estates in the
country and fine houses in town. To be able to speak of their mother as
"the baroness" suited them very well. Andreas saw but little of these
gilded relatives--who yet were good-hearted men, and very kindly
disposed towards him--for their magnificent surroundings were appalling
to his simple mind. His few friends were more nearly in his own walk
in life, and his friendship with them had been built up, as substantial
friendship should be, by slow degrees.

At the Cafe Nuernberger, near by his own little shop--a bakery celebrated
for the excellence of its bread, and for the great variety of its
toothsome. German cakes--it was his custom to make daily purchases. With
the plump, rosy Aunt Hedwig, who presided over the bakery, he passed the
good word of the day shyly; he responded shyly to the friendly nod of
the baker, Gottlieb Brekel, when that worthy chanced to be in the shop;
and he shyly greeted a certain jolly Herr Sohnstein, a German lawyer of
distinction, who was about the bakery a great deal and who popularly was
believed to be a suitor for the plump Hedwig's plump hand. And these shy
greetings might have gone on day after day for all eternity--or at least
for so much of it as these several persons were entitled to live out on
earth--without increasing one particle in cordiality, had there not
been one other dweller in the bakery to act as a solvent upon the
bird-dealer's reserve. This was the baker's daughter Minna, a child a
year or two older than Roschen and cast in a sturdier mould.

There was that about Andreas which drew all children to him, even as his
birds were drawn to him; and a part of the spell certainly was the love
for children that always was in his heart. The small Minna was disposed
not a little to