Shakspeare, in one of the most touching and beautiful of his sonnets, tells us how he bemoaned his outcast state, "And troubled deaf heaven with his bootless cries;" but with no such cries of mine is the reader doomed to be troubled. Indeed, when I parted from my Hessians on the occasion referred to, I never dreamed of mentioning them more. I had heard, as it seemed, their last creak. Not only were they out of sight, but out of mind. It appeared just as likely that I should ever again be excited on their account, as that I should hang them up à-la-General-Bombastes, and make war upon their adventurous displacer. Yet it was not three months after the event recorded, that in the city, in broad-daylight, my hat was all but lifted off by the sudden insurrection of my hair, on recognising my boots again. Yes, the very boots that once were mine, "_et nullus error!_" or, as we say in English, "and no mistake!" As easily to be identified were they as the freckled, wrinkled, shrunken features of a beloved friend, parted from in plump youth. I knew my boots, if I may so say, by their _expression_. Altered as they were, to me were they the same:--"alike, but oh! how different." "The light of other days had faded." It could not be said of either Hessian, that it figured on a "leg" this time. The wearer was evidently a collector in the "cast-off" line--had been respectable, and was still bent on keeping up appearances. This was plainly indicated by the _one_ tassel which the pair of boots yet boasted between them--a brown-looking remnant of grandeur, and yet a lively compromise with decay. The poor things were sadly distorted; the heels were hanging over, illustrating the downward tendency of the possessor; and there was a _leetle_ crack visible at the side. They were Dayless and Martinless--dull as a juryman--worn out like a cross-examined witness. They would take water like a teetotaller. There was scarcely a kick left in them. They were in a decline of the galloping sort; and appeared just capable of lasting out until an omnibus came by. A walk of a mile would have ensured emancipation to more than one of the toes that inhabited them.