First of all came the dinner in her parents' great sitting-room, at which, as usual, the journeymen and apprentices were present. Madame Feyertag insisted that, before coming to the table, each should wash his hands at the pump, and brush his jacket. To-day this ceremony, which frequently was somewhat hurried, was performed with a thoroughness that proved the homage each offered his master's daughter to be no mere formality, but an offering from the heart. The head journeyman had even availed himself of his superior social position, so far as to appear with a bouquet, which, with a few well-chosen words, he presented to the blushing child. Madame Feyertag pretended not to notice this. She seemed to have some suspicion that the worthy man might consider it a standing tradition in the family, that the head journeyman must marry the master's daughter, and though she herself had experienced the blessings of such a _mésalliance_, she hoped for a better match for her only daughter. The shoemaker had no such aspirations. When he reflected upon the past, he remembered very different attentions, which even without any festal occasion, he had paid the female members of his master's family. He was in a very good humor, eat three large pieces of the famous plum cake, and finally ordered two bottles of wine to be brought from the cellar, in which he drank Reginchen's health in a speech, that spite of the strange admixture of fatherly tenderness and incomprehensible allusions to Schopenhauer, was admired by all the journeymen as a pattern of oratorical art. Yet despite all this, the solemn meal did not last more than half an hour, and it was exactly half-past twelve when the little heroine of the day, according to her usual custom, carried the brothers' dinner up to the "tun." The low price which they paid for their board did not admit of their being served with food more dainty than that with which the people in the workroom were forced to content themselves, but Madame Feyertag, who had a kind heart and felt an almost maternal solicitude for Balder on account of his beauty and delicate health, always remembered to keep some of the best pieces for her boarders before supplying her own people.