and "moralized the spectacle" before me. How many had I read of--nay seen and known--who had started in life like my boots,--bright, unwrinkled, symmetrical,--and who had sunk by sure degrees, by wanderings farther and farther among the puddles and kennels of society, even into the same extremity of unsightly and incurable distortion. ----"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.