Witches Loaves Summary

Martha Meacham is a forty-year-old unmarried woman who runs a bakery. Several times a week, a
man who speaks with a German accent comes in and buys two stale loaves of bread.

She is attracted to him and deduces he must be an artist because of the paint stains she observes on
his fingers. One day, she brings down a painting she owns and sets it up in the bakery, hoping it will
confirm her conjecture.

Sure enough, the next time the man comes in to buy his stale bread, he notices the painting and
engages her in conversation about it, asserting that the perspective in the painting is not very good.
This leads Martha to believe she was right about him being an artist, and she starts to entertain
dreams of marrying him to support him in his art. She uses a mixture of quince seed and borax to
improve her complexion and make herself more appealing to him, and wears a blue-dotted silk
apron, replacing her own brown serge one.

She notices that the man is becoming increasingly thin and weak, and infers that he must be
struggling to earn a living from his art. So one day, when a fire engine passes in the road outside and
the man is distracted by it, she opens up the two stale loaves and furtively inserts a generous amount
of butter into both, to fatten him up.

She imagines what it will be like for the man when he opens the bread and discovers her kindness.
But not long after this, the door to her bakery opens and the artist comes in with a young man
smoking a pipe. The artist shouts at her and accuses her of being a ‘Dummkopf’ (German for ‘fool’),
a ‘Tausendonfer’ (German for ‘millipede’, i.e., a pest), and a ‘meddingsome [i.e., meddling] old cat’
before storming out.

It is left to his young companion to explain the reason for this outburst. He tells Martha that his
friend, whose name is Blumberger, is an architectural draughtsman who has spent three months
drawing a plan for a new city hall. Once he had marked out the drawing in pencil, he had been using
crumbs of the stale bread to rub out the pencil lines. The butter had got grease on his drawing and
ruined it.

When the man has left, Martha goes into the back room of her bakery and removes her blue-dotted
apron, replacing it with the old brown one. She also disposes of the quince seed and borax mixture
she had been using to improve her complexion: she has given up on finding love.

‘Witches’ Loaves’: analysis

‘Witches’ Loaves’ is one of O. Henry’s light stories, and also one of his shortest (and few of his stories
ran to more than a few pages). It’s essentially a tale about an act of kindness which backfires, but in
doing so, it also puts an end to what the female protagonist believes to be a promising courtship.

And O. Henry encourages us to feel sympathy for Martha Meacham, who wishes to help a fellow
human being who appears to have fallen on hard times. Of course, she has a vested interest in the
matter, since she is clearly looking for companionship and a potential husband, and believes the
‘artist’ may be a likely partner for her.
Her deductions, however, prove to be incorrect. Blumberger is not some starving artist but a well-
paid draughtsman who has been given the important job of designing a new city hall: no small
undertaking, and presumably one which pays better than the two thousand dollars in savings which
Martha has. He buys stale bread not because it’s all he can afford to eat; indeed, he doesn’t plan on
eating the bread at all. ‘Witches’ Loaves’ is about an innocent and well-meaning misunderstanding.

At the same time, however, it is worth bearing in mind Martha’s age. She is unmarried – what would
been referred to as a ‘spinster’ when the story was written – and forty years old. Time is running out
for her to find a husband or, quite probably, she will grow old and die alone.

Blumberger offers a potential opportunity for courtship and, eventually, possibly even marriage.
When the artist turns out to be a draughtsman whose work she has inadvertently ruined through her
kind deed, she realises that all the borax and quince seeds in the world will not help. She seems
resigned to her fate as a single woman.

The story’s title, ‘Witches’ Loaves’, offers a somewhat less kindly interpretation of Martha’s motives.
Given the association between women and evil enchantment, the title suggests that Martha has
attempted to ‘bewitch’ Blumberger with the butter in order to try to win him as her husband. Of
course, this may strike us as a little harsh, but it’s probably how Blumberger, who has just had three
months’ work ruined, would view the matter.

And a less generous interpretation of her actions might view her as a lonely and somewhat
desperate woman who invents an identity for a man she hardly knows because she loves the
romantic idea of the struggling artist whom she can ‘save’ with her fresh bread and cakes and her
two thousand dollars.

Instead of being up-front with him and offering to give him fresh bread or a cake as a gift and gesture
of goodwill, she tricks him by sneaking the butter into the bread and, in doing so, is the architect (no
pun intended) of her own unhappiness.

But then, if she had done so, rather than secretly concealing a gift inside his loaves, she would have
discovered he was a more practical-minded draughtsman rather than a romantic artist. Would she
have still desired him then? Or was she more in love with the idea of who he was, which she had
invented out of her daydreaming imagination?