A Romance of Tompkins Square

her mother over again, Gottlieb said; but this was not by any means true. She did have her mother's goodness and sweetness, but her sturdy body bespoke her father's stronger strain. Aunt Hedwig, of this same strain, undisguisedly was stocky. Minna was only comfortably stout, with good broad shoulders, and an honest round waist that anybody with half an eye for waists could see would be a satisfactory armful. And she had also Aunt Hedwig's constant cheeriness. All day long her laugh sounded happily through the house, or her voice went blithely in happy talk, or, failing anybody to talk to, trilled out some scrap of a sweet old German song. The two apprentices and the young man who drove the bread-wagon of course were wildly and desperately in love with her--a tender passion that they dared not disclose to its object, but that they frequently and boastingly aired to each other. Naturally these interchanges of confidence were apt to be somewhat tempestuous. As the result of one of them, when the elder apprentic