'I have told you I can do nothing without leave from your mother.'
'I will see you have it.'
"Returning home, the scholar ventured to ask for a pair of boots. The request struck Samud's mother as so extraordinary that she made him repeat his inquiry twice. It was all the more strange as it was the first time the scholar had troubled about his dress. When he was ten they had the greatest difficulty in the world to get him to give up a long pinafore of figured cotton, which he considered far more comfortable than all the breeches and all the doublets on earth; then, from the age of ten to the age of fifteen, he had worn with indifference any garments his mother had thought good to put him in, always preferring dirty and old ones to clean and new, because in them he was allowed to go out in all weathers and to roll about in all kinds of places. So the demand for a pair of boots seemed to his poor mother altogether most unprecedented, and she was alarmed for her son's reason.
'A pair of boots!' she repeated. 'What will you wear them with?'
'A pair of tight-fitting breeches, mother.'
'A pair of tight-fitting breeches! But you must know your legs are as spindle-shaped as a cock's.'
"'Excuse me, mother,' the schoolboy replied, with some show of logic; 'if I have good enough calves to wear short breeches, they are good enough to wear tight-fitting breeches.'
"The mother admired her son's wit, and, half conquered by the repartee, she said,'We might perhaps manage to find the tight-fitting trousers in the clothes-press; but the boots ... where will you find the boots?'
'Why, at Landereau's!'