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On the left side the man wore a bitter almond that was his heart; but the maiden, on the other hand, was honey-cake all over. They were placed as samples on the shop-board, and remaining there a long time, at last they fell in love with one another, but neither told the other, as they should have done if they had expected anything to come of it.
To any intelligent baker the reason for this was obvious: Hans was making his lebkuchen with new honey-cake. Thus made, even by the best of recipes, it could not be anything but a failure. Gottlieb gave a long sigh of relief as he realized this comforting fact, and at the same time thought of his own great store of honey-pots there were hundreds of them now all ready and waiting to his hand.
This first stage in the making of lebkuchen is but means to an end, and for the compassing of that end the blending and the baking of the finished and perfect honey-cake each master-baker has his own especial recipe, that has come down to him from some ancestral baker of rare parts, or that by his own inborn genius has been directly inspired.
And then Hans returned to his violated chest, and found that the dread which had assailed his soul was founded in substantial truth the recipe was gone! In itself the loss of the recipe was no very great matter, for he knew it by heart; but that Gottlieb who had also a cellar full of rich old honey-cake should have gained possession of it was a desperate matter indeed.
It was about Christmas-time which is the proper time for this office that Gottlieb made his first honey-cake; and it was a little before the Christmas following that his first lebkuchen was baked.
Each year he added to his stock of honey-cake; and he knew that when fortune favored him at last, as he still believed that fortune would favor him, he would have in store such honey-cake as would enable him to make lebkuchen fit to be eaten by the Kaiser himself!
Yet from a wise old baker he had gleaned the knowledge of honey-cake making, and he believed strongly that from the pure fount of his own genius he could draw a formula for the making of lebkuchen so excellent that compared with it all other lebkuchen would seem tasteless. But these were the bright dreams of youth, which age had refused to realize.
To the accompaniment of most gruesome and characteristic music he tells his wife of the witch who haunts the woods, and who, living in a honey-cake house, entices little children to it, bakes them into gingerbread in her oven, and then devours them. The second act, "In the Forest," is preluded by a characteristic instrumental number, "The Witches' Ride."
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