l of dismay that the individual in
question sat down, one morning, on "Webster's Unabridged,"--that being
the only available seat in an apartment not over-capacious,--and went
into a committee of the whole on the state of her boots. The prospect
was not inviting. Heels frightfully wrenched and askew, and showing
indubitable symptoms of a precipitate secession; binding frayed,
ravelled, evidently stubborn in resistance, but at length overpowered
and rent into innumerable fissures; buttons dislocated, dragged up by
the roots, yet clinging to a forlorn hope with a courage and constancy
worthy of a better cause; upper-leather (glove-kid), once black, now
"the ashen hue of age," gray, purple, flayed, scratched, and generally
lacerated; soles, ah! the soles! There the process of disintegration
culminated. Curled, crisped, jagged, gaping, stratified, laminated,
torn by internal convulsions, upheaved by external forces, they might
have belonged to some pre-Adamic era, and certainly presented a series
of dissolving views, deeply interesting, but not, it must be confessed,
highly entertaining.

After arranging these boots in every possible combination,--side by
side, heel to heel, toe to toe,--and finding that the result of each
and every combination was that

"No light, but rather darkness visible,
Served only to discover sights of woe,"

the Individual at length, with a sigh, placed them, keel upwards, on
the floor in front of her, and, resting her head in her hands, gazed at
them with such a fixedness and rigidity that she might have been taken
for an old Ouate, absorbed in the exercise of his legitimate calling.
(The old Druidical order were divided into three classes, Druids,
Bards, and Ouates. The Druids philosophized and theologized, the Bards
harped and sang, and the Ouates divined and CONTEMPLATED THE NATURE OF
THINGS. I thought I would tell you, as you might not know. I execrate
the self-conceited way some people have of tossing off their erudite
items and allusions in a careless, familiar style, as if it is such A B
C to them that they don't for a moment think of any one's not
understanding it. Worse still is it to have some jagged brickbat, dug
up from a heap of Patagonian rubbish, flung at you with a "we have all
heard of"; or to be turned off, just as your ears are wide open to
listen to an old pre-Thautic myth, with "the story of ---- is too
familiar to need repetition." You have not the most dista