——"Not Warren, nor Day and Martin,
Nor all the patent liquids o' the earth,
Shall ever brighten them with that jet black
They owed in former days."
My very right to my own property had vanished. They had ceased to be my boots; they were ceasing to be boots. They cost me something nevertheless; for having in my perturbation merely told the driver to "drive on," he took me to Bayswater instead of Covent-garden; and, as the price of my abstraction, abstracted seven-and-six-pence as his fare.
From a hackney-coachman they seem to have descended to the driver of what had once been a donkey; to one who cried "fine mellow pears," "green ripe gooseberries," and other hard and sour assistants in the destruction of the human race. This I discovered one day by seeing "my boots" dragged to a police-office (their owner in them), where indeed one of the pair—if pair they might still be called—figured as a credible witness; it having been employed as a weapon, held by the solitary strap that yet adhered to it, for inflicting due punishment on the head of its master's landlord, a ruffian who had had the brutal inhumanity to tap at the door of an innocent tenant, and ask for his rent.
It is probable that in this skirmish they sustained some damage, and required "renovation" once more; for I subsequently saw them at one of those "cobbler's-stalls" which are fast disappearing (the stall becoming a shop, and the shop an emporium), with an intimation in chalk upon the soles—"to be sold." Of the original Hessians nothing remained but a portion of the leggings. They had been soled and re-soled; the old patches had disappeared; and there was now a patch upon the new fronts which they had acquired. Having had them from the last, to the last I resolved to track them; and now found them in the possession of a good ancient watchman of the good ancient time in Fleet-street, from whose feet, however, they were one night treacherously stolen as he sat quietly slumbering in his box. The boots wandered once more into vicious paths, having become the property of a begging-letter impostor of that day, in whose company they were seen to stagger out of a gin-shop—then to run away with their tenant—to bear him, all unconscious of kennels, on both sides of the road, faster than lamplighter or postman can travel—and finally to trip him up against the machine of a "needy knifegrinder" (his nose coming into collision with the revolving stone), who, compassionating the naked feet of his seemingly penniless and sober fellow-lodger, had that very morning presented him with part of a pair of boots, as being better than no shoe-leather. This fragmentary donation was the sad remnant of my Hessians—the "last remains of princely York."
When we give a pair of old boots to the poor, how little do we consider into what disgusting nooks and hideous recesses they may carry their new owner! Let no one shut up the coffers of his heart, or check even momentarily the noble impulse of charity; but it is curious to note what purposes a bashful maiden's left-off finery may be made to serve on the stage of a show at Greenwich fair; how an honest matron's muff, passed into other hands, may be implicated in a case of shop-lifting; how the hat of a great statesman may come to be handed round to ragamuffins for a collection of half-pence for the itinerant conjuror; or how the satin slippers of a countess may be sandalled on the aching feet of a girl whose youth is one weary and wretched caper upon stilts!
"My Hessians"—neither mine, nor Hessians, now—were on their last legs. Theirs had not been "a beauty for ever unchangingly bright." They had experienced their decline; their fall was nigh. Their earliest patchings suggested, as a similitude, the idea of a Grecian temple, whose broken columns are repaired with brick; the brick preponderates as ruin prevails, until at length the original structure is no more. The boots became one patch! Such were they on that winter-morn, when a ruddy-faced "translator" sat at his low door, on a low stool, the boots on his lap undergoing examination. After due inspection, his estimate of their value was expressed by his adopting the expedient of Orator Henley; that is to say, by cutting the legs off, and reducing what remained of their pride to the insignificance of a pair of shoes; which, sold in that character to a match-vender, degenerated after a few weeks into slippers. Sic transit, &c.
Of the appropriation of the amputated portion no very accurate account can be rendered. Fragments of the once soft and glossy leather furnished patches for dilapidated goloshes; a pair or two of gaiter-straps were extricated from the ruins; and the "translator's" little boy manufactured from the remains a "sucker," of such marvellous efficacy that his father could never afterwards keep a lapstone in the stall.