wn riding boots with marvellous sooty
glow, as if, though new, they had been worn a hundred years. Those pairs
could only have been made by one who saw before him the Soul of Boot--so
truly were they prototypes incarnating the very spirit of all foot-gear.
These thoughts, of course, came to me later, though even when I was
promoted to him, at the age of perhaps fourteen, some inkling haunted me
of the dignity of himself and brother. For to make boots--such boots as
he made--seemed to me then, and still seems to me, mysterious and
wonderful.

I remember well my shy remark, one day, while stretching out to him my
youthful foot:

"Isn't it awfully hard to do, Mr. Gessler?"

And his answer, given with a sudden smile from out of the sardonic
redness of his beard: "Id is an Ardt!"

Himself, he was a little as if made from leather, with his yellow crinkly
face, and crinkly reddish hair and beard; and neat folds slanting down
his cheeks to the corners of his mouth, and his guttural and one-toned
voice; for leather is a sardonic substance, and stiff and slow of
purpose. And that was the character of his face, save that his eyes,
which were grey-blue, had in them the simple gravity of one secretly
possessed by the Ideal. His elder brother was so very like him--though
watery, paler in every way, with a great industry--that sometimes in
early days I was not quite sure of him until the interview was over.
Then I knew that it was he, if the words, "I will ask my brudder," had
not been spoken; and that, if they had, it was his elder brother.

When one grew old and wild and ran up bills, one somehow never ran them
up with Gessler Brothers. It would not have seemed becoming to go in
there and stretch out one's foot to that blue iron-spectacled glance,
owing him for more than--say--two pairs, just the comfortable reassurance
that one was still his client.

For it was not possible to go to him very often--his boots lasted
terribly, having something beyond the temporary--some, as it were,
essence of boot stitched into them.

One went in, not as into most shops, in the mood of: "Please serve me,
and let me go!" but restfully, as one enters a church; and, sitting on
the single wooden chair, waited--for there was never anybody there.
Soon, over the top edge of that sort of well--rather dark, and smelling
soothingly of leather--which formed the shop, there would be seen his
face, or that of his elder brother, peering down. A gutt