"'Where of?'
"'Muggleton.'
"'It is them!' exclaimed Wardle. 'By Heaven, we've found them.'"
Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.
FLEMISH (EIGHTEENTH CENTURY). FRENCH (SEVENTEENTH CENTURY).
X
BOOTS, SHOES, AND OTHER COVERINGS FOR THE FEET
The good St. Crispin, of blessed memory, cobbling shoes for the poor by the light of his candle and filling up the interval with preaching, is a figure which all shoemakers regard with reverence. How did Crispin become the tutelary saint of shoemakers? Well, it was in this wise. Crispin, travelling with his brother Crispinian, in company with St. Denis, to Soissons in France to propagate the Christian faith, towards the close of the third century, in order that he might not be a burden to others for his maintenance, exercised at night the trade of shoemaker, preaching the Gospel by day. The shoes were sold at a low price to the poor, an angel (so the legend recounts) miraculously furnishing the leather. According to another version of the legend, the saint stole the leather, so as to enable him to benefit the poor. Crispin's efforts, like those of so many other benefactors of their kind, were poorly rewarded. He was ordered to be beheaded, and suffered martyrdom in 287 A.D., not, however, for his shoemaking, or for his thefts, but on account of his religious tenets. Some accounts state that he and his brother were flung into a cauldron of molten lead.