The shop where he bent over his lapstone for ten hours a day, excluding meal times, was an odd-looking structure, in a poor quarter of a city which we shall call Micklegard; and which, if any one should strive to locate, we warn him that the effort will bring him only confusion of face and dire bewilderment. For its features may be recognized, now here, now there, like those mocking faces that peered at Ritter Huldbrand through the mists of the Enchanted Forest.
The shoemaker’s dwelling contained but three rooms. The front, a shingled frame building of one story, presented its pointed gable at the street like a huge caret, denoting that all the sky and stars, perhaps something further, were wanted by those beneath. This was the shop; behind it were the kitchen, looking out upon a small square yard, opening on a not over-clean alley; and a bedroom above, whose front window peered over the gable roof, between the high blank walls of the adjoining houses, while the opposite one kept watch from the rear: and each, in its curtainless bareness, looked equally desolate and unsatisfied.
It was on a cold, dreary November evening that the shoemaker put aside his work somewhat earlier than usual, and, after carefully closing his shutters, stepped through the ever-open door into his little kitchen, which was almost as red-hot as the huge cooking-stove, filled with bituminous coal, that occupied nearly half the tiny apartment. The other half was over-filled by a gigantic four-post bedstead, on which two corpulent feather-beds swelled nearly to the tester, and were overspread by a patchwork quilt, gaudy of hue and startling in design. Fringed dimity curtains hung from the tester, until their snow-white balls caught the reflection from the glowing counterpane, when they were snatched away, as if from the possible soil of contact, and fastened in the middle of each side by an immense yellow rosette. Upon one side of the stove stood an oil-cloth-covered table, which served equally for the preparation and consumption of food; above it, a steep, narrow stair wound upward to the room above; and on the other side of the kitchen, basking in heat which would have consumed a salamander, were a small old-fashioned candle-stand, half hidden by a linen cover, wrought in the old Levitical colors of red and blue, and sustaining a cheap kerosene lamp; a slat rocking-chair, with patchwork cushions, and a tiny old woman bowed over a huge German Bible, bound in parchment, with a tarnished steel clasp and corners, and heavy smooth yellow leaves.
As her son entered, Frau Metzerott lifted her brown, withered face, and fixed her dark eyes and steel-rimmed spectacles upon him.
“You have quitted early this evening,” she said, in the Platt-Deutsch dialect, which, with the High German of the book on her knee, was her only mode of speech, though she had lived in America for nearly forty years.
He nodded briefly, and then, as if by an afterthought, added, “It is the evening of the Kaffee Klatsch at the Hall, and I will go there for my supper. There is a little concert to-night, and dancing.”
“And a few pretty girls, Karlchen?”
He smiled, not ill-pleased, but vouchsafed no further remark as he sprang up the difficult, crooked stairway to his bedroom.
The old woman looked after him with a slow shake of her head. “I wish he would marry one of them,” she thought. “There is room for a wife, up yonder, and it is hard doing the work alone. Besides, one cannot live forever, and, when I am gone, who will make his coffee and his apple cakes as he likes them?”
With a sigh, she fell to reading again.