Gala-Days [79]
form; before which, however, it became necessary to do a little shopping. An individual--one of the party, whose name I will not divulge, and whose identity you never can conjecture, so it isn't worth while to exhaust yourself with guessing--found one day, while she was in the country, that she had walked a hole through the bottom of her boots. How she discovered this fact is of no moment; but, upon investigating the subject, she ascertained that it could scarcely be said with propriety that there was a hole in her boots, but, to use a term which savors of the street, though I employ it literally, there WASN'T ANYTHING ELSE. Now the fact of itself is not worthy of remark. That the integrity of a pair of boots should yield to the continued solicitations of time, toil, bone, and muscle, is too nearly a matter of everyday occurrence to excite alarm. The "irrepressible conflict" between leather and land has, so far as I know, been suspended but once since
"Adam delved and Eve span,"
and that was only an amnesty of forty years while the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness. But when you are deep in the heart of the country, scouring woods, climbing mountains, and fording rivers, having with your usual improvidence neglected to furnish yourself with stout boots, then a "horrid chasm," or series of chasms, yawning in the only pair that are of any use to you, presents a spectacle which no reflective mind can contemplate without dismay.
It was, in fact, with a good deal 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 distant conception what the story is, yet you don't like to say so, because it seems to be intimated that every intelligent
"Adam delved and Eve span,"
and that was only an amnesty of forty years while the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness. But when you are deep in the heart of the country, scouring woods, climbing mountains, and fording rivers, having with your usual improvidence neglected to furnish yourself with stout boots, then a "horrid chasm," or series of chasms, yawning in the only pair that are of any use to you, presents a spectacle which no reflective mind can contemplate without dismay.
It was, in fact, with a good deal 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 distant conception what the story is, yet you don't like to say so, because it seems to be intimated that every intelligent