"It is a good knave's trade; we can put a great deal of
copper into the gold without anyone's finding it out."

The thought was agreed to be a very good one; they hired a furnace and
turned goldsmiths. But two slight circumstances affected their trade:
the first, that people did not approve of the coppered gold; the
second, that the two elder brothers, whenever they had sold anything,
used to leave little Gluck to mind the furnace, and go and drink out
the money in the alehouse next door. So they melted all their gold
without making money enough to buy more, and were at last reduced to
one large drinking mug, which an uncle of his had given to little
Gluck, and which he was very fond of and would not have parted with for
the world, though he never drank anything out of it but milk and water.
The mug was a very odd mug to look at. The handle was formed of two
wreaths of flowing golden hair, so finely spun that it looked more like
silk than metal, and these wreaths descended into and mixed with a
beard and whiskers of the same exquisite workmanship, which surrounded
and decorated a very fierce little face, of the reddest gold
imaginable, right in the front of the mug, with a pair of eyes in it
which seemed to command its whole circumference. It was impossible to
drink out of the mug without being subjected to an intense gaze out of
the side of these eyes, and Schwartz positively averred that once,
after emptying it, full of Rhenish, seventeen times, he had seen them
wink! When it came to the mug's turn to be made into spoons, it half
broke poor little Gluck's heart; but the brothers only laughed at him,
tossed the mug into the melting pot, and staggered out to the alehouse,
leaving him, as usual, to pour the gold into bars when it was all ready.

When they were gone, Gluck took a farewell look at his old friend in
the melting pot. The flowing hair was all gone; nothing remained but
the red nose and the sparkling eyes, which looked more malicious than
ever. "And no wonder," thought Gluck, "after being treated in that
way." He sauntered disconsolately to the window and sat himself down
to catch the fresh evening air and escape the hot breath of the
furnace. Now this window commanded a direct view of the range of
mountains which, as I told you before, overhung the Treasure Valley,
and more especially of the peak from which fell the Golden River. It
was just at the close of the day, and when Gluck sat down at the