t not without regret that
she had increased the disagreement between her father and grandfather.
She met the vans and gipsies slowly leaving the site of the fair, the
children running along with bare brown feet. She went under the
archaeologically interesting gateway, and knocked at the door of Tiras
Wise, shoemaker, "established 200 years."

Tiras Wise of the present generation was thin and nervous, weary of the
centuries, worn out, and miserable-looking. Amaryllis, strong in the
possession of a golden sovereign, attacked him sharply for his
perfidious promises; her boots promised at Christmas were not mended
yet.

Tiras, twiddling a lady's boot in one hand, and his foot measure in the
other, very humbly and deprecatingly excused himself; there had been so
much trouble with the workmen, some were so tipsy, and some would not
work; they were always demanding higher wages, and just as he had a job
in hand going off and leaving it half finished--shoemaker's tricks
these. Sometimes, indeed, he could not get a workman, and then there was
the competition of the ready-made boot from Northampton; really, it was
most trying--it really was.

"Well, and when am I going to have the boots?" said Amaryllis, amused at
the poor fellow's distress. "When _are_ they going to be finished?"

"You see, Miss Iden," said the shoemaker's mother, coming to help her
son, "the fact is, he's just worried out of his life with his men--and
really--"

"You don't seem to get on very well with your shoemaking, Mr. Wise,"
said the customer, smiling.

"The fact is," said poor Wise, in his most melancholy manner, with a
deep sigh, "the fact is, the men don't know their work as they used to,
they spoil the leather and cut it wrong, and leave jobs half done, and
they're always drinking; the leather isn't so good as it used to be; the
fact is," with a still deeper sigh, "_we can't make a boot_."

At which Amaryllis laughed outright, to think that people should have
been in business two hundred years as shoemakers, and yet could not make
a boot!

Her experience of life as yet was short, and she saw things in their
first aspect; it is not till much later we observe that the longer
people do one thing, the worse they do it, till in the end they cannot
do it at all.

She presently selected a pair for herself, 9_s._, and another pair for
her mother, 10_s._ 6_d._, leaving sixpence over; add sixpence discount
for ready-money, and she was still rich with