as you may;--but, dandies all, I have not done with you yet. To resume. "He used to be exceedingly partial to Hessian boots." I confess to the boots; but it was when they were worn even by men who walked on loggats. I had legs. Besides, I was very young, and merely put on my boots to _follow_ the fashion. "His age, if his looks be not deceptive, is _somewhere between_ forty-three and forty-five." A very obscure and elaborated mode of insinuating that I am forty-_four_. "Somewhere between!" The truth is--though nothing but extreme provocation should induce me to proclaim even truth when age is concerned,--that I am "somewhere between" twenty-seven and sixty-three, or I may say sixty-four;--but I hate exaggeration. _Exit_, G. CK. FOOTNOTE: [Footnote 1: An exact representation of it will embellish a future "Omnibus."] MY LAST PAIR OF HESSIAN BOOTS. "Ah! sure a pair was never seen So justly formed--" [Illustration] Hoby would say, that as "all are not men who bear the human form," so all are not boots that bear the pedal shape. All boots, for example, are not Hessians; nor are all Hessians like my last pair. Mathews used to tell a story of some French Hoby, who, having with incredible genius constructed a pair of boots, which Tom Thumb when a little boy could no more have got on than Cinderella's sister could the magic slipper, refused to part with them for any sum of money--he had "made them in a moment of enthusiasm." Myriads of such moments were consumed in the construction of my last pair. The boots published by Mr. Warren in magazines and country newspapers, exhibiting the grinning portrait of a gentleman in the interesting act of shaving, or a cat bristling up and outwondering Katerfelto, were vulgar in form, and dull of polish, beside mine Hessians. Pleasant it was, just as I was budding into life, to draw them on, and sit with one knee crossing the other, to contemplate my favourite leg. I used to wish myself a centipede, to wear fifty pairs of Hessians at a time. To say that the boots "fitted like gloves" would be to pay the most felicitous pair of white kids a compliment. They had just as many natural wrinkles as they ought to have; and for the tassels--we have all seen the dandies of that day take out a comb, and comb the tassels of their fire-bucket-looking boots as often as they got into disorder; but mine needed no aid from such trickery and finessing.