"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.
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!
