On these occasions women may be said to hold their exhibitions of pictures, the cakes being the altar-pieces. Everyone nibbles at and minutely inspects these baked escutcheons of her neighbour's nobility; and each has, as it were, her cake attached to her, as a medal is, or the lead tickets on bales of cloth, to indicate her value. They scarcely eat or drink anything, it is true, thick coffee being their consecrated sacrament wine, and thin transparent pastry their wafers; only the latter (in their friend's and hostess's houses) tastes best, and is eaten almost with fondness when it has turned out hard and stony and shot and dagger proof--or is burnt to a cinder--or, in short, is wretched from some cause or other; they cheerfully acknowledge all the failures of their dearest friends, and try to comfort them by taking them to their own houses and treating them to something of a _very different_ kind. As for our Lenette, she, my dear lady reader, has always been a baker of such a sort that male connoisseurs have preferred her crust, and female connoisseurs her crum, both classes maintaining that no one but she (and yourself, dearest) could bake anything like either. The kitchen fire was this salamander's second element, for the first and native element of this dear nixie was water. To be scouring with sand, and squattering and splattering in it, in a great establishment like Siebenkæs's (who had devoted all Leibgeber's Ephraimites to the keeping of this feast), was quite her vocation. No kiss could be applied to her glowing face on such a day--and indeed she had her hands pretty full, for at ten o'clock the butcher came bringing more work with him. The world will be glad (I'm perfectly certain in my own mind) if I just give them a very short account of this business--_who_ could have done it better, for that matter? The facts of it were these: at the beginning of summer the four fellow lodgers had clubbed together and bought a cow in poor condition which they had then put up to fatten. The bookbinder, the cobbler, the poor's advocate and the hairdresser--between whom and his tenants there was this distinction, that they owed _their_ rent to _him_, whereas he owed _his_ to his creditors--caused to be prepaid and drawn up by a skilful hand (which was attached to the arm of Siebenkæs) an authentic instrument (here KOLBE the word-purist will snarl at poor innocent me in his usual manner for employing foreign words in a document based on the Roman law) relative to the life and death of the cow; in which instrument the four contracting parties aforesaid--who all stood attentively round the document, he who was sitting and drawing it excepted--bound and engaged themselves in manner following, that is to say, that-- 1stly. Each of the four parties interested, as aforesaid, in the said cow might and should have the privilege of milking her alternately.