tender heart. He held, of course, that there was nothing like
leather, especially for mitigating the distress of the orphan and
causing the widow's heart to sing for joy. Every year he received
confidentially from the school-mistress a list of the worst-shod
children in the school, from whom he selected a dozen belonging to the
poorest families, that he might provide each of them at Christmas with a
pair of good, strong shoes. The boots of labourers out of work and of
other unfortunates he mended free of cost, regularly devoting to this
purpose that part of the Sabbath which was not occupied in proving the
non-existence of God. There was, for instance, poor Mary Henson--a loose
deserted creature with illegitimate children of various paternity, and
another always on the way--rejected by every charity in the parish,--to
whom Hankin never failed to send needed footwear both for herself and
her brats.

Further, whenever a pair of shoes had to be condemned as "not worth
mending," he endeavoured to retain them for a purpose of his own,
sometimes paying a few pence for them as "old leather." When summer came
round he set to work patching the derelicts as best he could, and would
sometimes have thirty or forty pairs in readiness by the end of June.
This was the season when the neighbourhood was annually invaded by
troops of pea-pickers--a very miscellaneous collection of humanity
comprising at the one extreme broken army men and university graduates,
and at the other the lowest riff-raff of the towns. It was Hankin's
regular custom to visit the camps where these people were quartered,
with the avowed object of "studying human nature," but really for the
purpose of spying out the shoeless, or worse than shoeless, feet. He was
a notable performer on the concertina, and I well remember seeing him in
the middle of a pea-field, surrounded by as sorry a group of human
wreckage as civilisation could produce, listening, or dancing to his
strains. Hankin's eyes were on their feet all the time. When the
performance was over he went round to one and another, mostly women, and
said something which made their eyes glisten.

And here it may be recorded that one day, towards the end of his life,
he received a letter from Canada containing a remittance for fifty
pounds. The writer, Major ---- of the North-West Mounted Police, said
that the money was payment for a certain pair of old shoes, the gift of
which "had set him on his feet in more s