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.