_Shoes._--It is amazing the misery the people of civilization endure in and from their shoes. Nobody is ever, as they should be, comfortable at once in them; they hope in the long-run and after much agony, and when they are nearly done, to make them fit, especially if they can get them once well wet, so that the mighty knob of the big toe may adjust himself and be at ease. For my part, if I were rich, I would advertise for a clean, wholesome man, whose foot was exactly my size, and I would make him wear my shoes till I could put them on, and not know I was in them.[1] Why is all this? Why do you see every man's and woman's feet so out of shape? Why are there corns, with their miseries and maledictions? Why the virulence and unreachableness of those that are "soft"? Why do our nails grow in, and sometimes have to be torn violently off? [1] Frederick the Great kept an aid-de-camp for this purpose, and, poor fellow! he sometimes wore them too long, and got a kicking for his pains. All because the makers and users of shoes have not common sense, and common reverence for God and his works enough to study the shape and motions of that wonderful pivot on which we turn and progress. Because FASHION,--that demon that I wish I saw dressed in her own crinoline, in bad shoes, a man's old hat, and trailing petticoats, and with her (for she must be a _her_) waist well nipped by a circlet of nails with the points inmost, and any other of the small torments, mischiefs, and absurdities she destroys and makes fools of us with,--whom, I say, I wish I saw drummed and hissed, blazing and shrieking, out of the world,--because this contemptible slave, which domineers over her makers, says the shoe must be elegant, must be so and so, and the beautiful living foot must be crushed into it, and human nature must limp along Princess Street and through life natty and wretched. It makes me angry when I think of all this. Now, do you want to know how to put your feet into new shoes, and yourself into a new world? Go and buy from Edmonston and Douglas sixpence worth of sense, in _Why the Shoe Pinches_; you will, if you get your shoemaker to do as it bids him, go on your ways rejoicing; no more knobby, half-dislocated big toes; no more secret parings, and slashings desperate, in order to get on that pair of exquisite boots or shoes.