THE BOOT-BILLS OF NARCISSUS.
An Irrelevant Biography.
(Scraps collected by Richard Medallion.)
SCRAP I.—Horticulture. (Boot-trees.)
Published at the Bodily Head. All body and precious little head.
"Ah! old men's boots don't go there, Sir," said the boot-maker to me one day, rather pointedly, pointing to the toes of the boots I had brought him for mending. As I danced home, writing another chronicle with every springing step, the remark filled me with reflection—such reflection, reader, as your mirror shows you when you gaze in it to rejoice in your own beauty.
Have you kept a diary for thirty years? Dear me! And have you kept your gas bills, your water-rates, your Christmas-cards, your writs, your circulars of summer sales? I might never have undertaken to write this biography if I had not chanced one evening—being unoccupied—to break open a private desk belonging to my friend Narcissus, and tearing open an envelope (sealed, and labelled "Compromising Postcards—to be opened before my death,") came across these old boot-bills, and been struck by the manner in which there lay revealed in them the story of the years over which they ran....