As for the slippers, improperly so called, they pinched divers corns, and pressed various bunions in their day, as the boots, their great progenitors, had done before them, sliding, shuffling, shambling, and dragging their slow length along; until in the ripeness of time, they, with other antiquities, were carried to Cutler-street, and sold to a venerable Jewess. She, with knife keen as Shylock's, ripped off the soles—all besides was valueless even to her—and, not without some pomp and ceremony, laid them out for sale on a board placed upon a crippled chair. Yes, for sale; and to that market for soles there soon chanced to repair an elderly son of poverty; who, having many little feet running about at home made shoes for them himself. The soles became his;
and thus of the apocryphal remains of my veritable Hessians, was there just sufficient leather left to interpose between the tender feet of a child, and the hard earth, his mother!
ON A WICKED SHOEMAKER.
You say he has sprung from Cain;—rather
Confess there's a difference vast:
For Cain was a son of the first father
While he is "a son of the last."