When thou my heart hast eaten,
Oh, let me not disguise
That sooner than my love can break
Will break my nutbrown eyes.
Both of them eagerly read these verses, and never had rhymes, never had any kind of poetry, been more deeply felt and appreciated than were these gingerbread stanzas. They could not help fancying that they had been specially written for them, for they fitted so marvelously their requirements.
"Ah, you give me a house," sighed Vreni. "But I have first made thee a gift of one myself, and of the real one. For our hearts are now our sole dwellings, and within them we live, and we carry our houses about with us wherever we may go, just like the snail. Other abode we have none left now."
"But then we are snails really, of which each carries the house of the other," replied Sali.
"Then we must never leave each other, for fear that we lose the other's house," answered Vreni.
They did not notice that they themselves were perpetrating the same species of humor as was spread out on the printed pasters of the gingerbread literature. So they continued to study the latter with deep interest. The most pathetic sentiments, both agreed, were found on the heartshaped cakes, whereof there was a great choice, both plain and ornamental, small and large. All the verses they read seemed to them wonderfully apt and appropriate to the occasion. When Vreni read on a gilt heart which like a lyre bore strings:
My heart is like a fiddlestring,
Touch gently it and it will sing,
she could not refrain from remarking: "How true that is! Why, I can hear my own heart making music!"
An image of Napoleon in gingerbread was also there, and even this, instead of speaking in heroic measure, symbolized a love-smitten swain, for it declared in wretched rhyme:
Terrific was Napoleon's might,
His sword of steel, his heart was light;
My love is sweet like any rose,
Yet is she faithful, goodness knows.