r it may be that
instead of the bottle we have a little tin box, wedded to its
cover,--how often have we not exclaimed between clenched teeth, 'What
man hath joined together man can pull asunder!'--and containing a kind
of black mud, which we apply with an unfortunate rag or with a brush
appropriately called the 'dauber.' Having daubed, we polish, breathing
our precious breath on the luminous surface for even greater luminosity.
The time is passing when we performed this task of pure lustration, as
Keats might have called it, in the cellar or the back hall, more fully,
but not completely, dressed, coatless, our waistcoats rakishly
unbuttoned or vulgarly upstairs, our innocent trousers hanging on their
gallowses, our shoes on our feet, and our physical activity not
altogether unlike that demanded by a home-exerciser to reduce the
abdomen. Men of girth have been advised to saw wood; I wonder that they
never have been advised to shine their own shoes--twenty-five times in
the morning and twenty-five times just before going to bed.

My own observation, although not continuous enough to have scientific
value, leads me to think that stout men are the more inveterate patrons
of the shoe-blacking parlor,--Caesar should have run one,--and that the
present popularity of the sponge in a bottle may derive from superfluous
girth. Invented as a dainty toilet accessory for women, and at first
regarded by men as effeminate, it is easy to see how insidiously the
sponge in a bottle would have attracted a stout husband accustomed to
shine his own shoes in the earlier contortionist manner. By degrees,
first one stout husband and then another, men took to the bottle; the
curse of effeminacy was lifted; the habit grew on men of all sizes. It
was not a perfect method,--it blacked too many other things besides
shoes, and provided an undesirable plaything for baby,--but it was a
step forward. There was a refinement, a _je ne sais quoi_, an 'easier
way,' about this sponge in a bottle; and, perhaps more than all, a
delusive promise that the stuff would dry shiny without friction, which
appealed to the imagination.

Then began to disappear a household familiar--that upholstered,
deceptive, utilitarian hassock kind of thing which, when opened,
revealed an iron foot-rest, a box of blacking,--I will not _say_ how
some moistened that blacking, but you and I, gentle reader, brought
water in a crystal glass from the kitchen,--and an ingenious tool whic