Gottlieb had but a sorry Christmas that year. The best that even Aunt Hedwig could say of his lebkuchen was that it was not bad. Herr Sohnstein, to be sure, brazenly declared that it was delicious; but Gottlieb remembered that Herr Sohnstein, who conducted a flourishing practice in the criminal courts, was trained in the art of romantic deviations from the truth whenever it was necessary to put a good face on a bad cause; and he observed sadly that the notary's teeth were at variance with his tongue, for the piece of lebkuchen that Herr Sohnstein ate was infinitessimally small. As for the regular German customers of the bakery, they simply bit one single bite and then refused to buy. Indeed, but for the children from St. Bridget's School--who, being for the most part boys, and Irish boys at that, presumably could eat anything--it is not impossible that that first baking of lebkuchen might have remained uneaten even until this present day. And it was due mainly to the stout stomachs of successive generations of these enterprising boys that the series of experiments which Gottlieb then began in the making of lebkuchen was brought, in the course of years, to something like a satisfactory conclusion. But even at its best, never was this lebkuchen at all like that of which in his hopeful youth he had dreamed. Herr Sohnstein, to be sure, spoke highly of it, and even managed to eat of it quite considerable quantities. Gottlieb did not imagine that Herr Sohnstein could have in this matter any ulterior motives; but Aunt Hedwig much more than half suspected that in order to please her by pleasing her brother he was making a sacrifice of his stomach to his heart. If this theory had any foundation in fact, it is certain that Herr Sohnstein did not appreciably profit by his gallant risk of indigestion; for while Aunt Hedwig by no means seemed disposed to shatter all his hopes by a sharp refusal, she gave no indication whatever of any intention to permit her ripe red lips to utter the longed-for word of assent. Aunt Hedwig, unquestionably, was needlessly cruel in her treatment of Herr Sohnstein, and he frequently told her so. Sometimes he would ask her, with a fine irony, if she meant to keep him waiting for his answer until her brother had made lebkuchen as good as the lebkuchen of Nuernberg? To which invariably she would reply that, in the first place, she did not know of any question that he ever had asked her that required an answer; and, in the second place, that she did mean to keep him waiting just precisely that long. And then she would add, with a delicate drollery that was all her own, that whenever he got tired of waiting he might hire a whole horse-car all to himself and ride right away. Ah, this Aunt Hedwig had a funny way with her!