To go barefooted in India must at times be a positive luxury. The higher classes in some parts wear no stockings, only covering their feet with white embroidered slippers. The colour of Oriental shoes appears to be of importance, indicating, I suppose, the rank and caste of the owner. Red and yellow are the favourite hues, the sole being often red, or black tipped with red. Yellow is the Mohammedan colour. An old writer tells a story which seems to show that it was jealously protected as the distinctive mark of a Turk. Some charitable persons having given a Christian beggar an old pair of yellow slippers, the unfortunate man’s feet caught the Sultan’s eye: his explanation could not save his life. While the Turks of that day wore yellow slippers, the Janissaries were obliged to wear red shoes. Another Oriental traveller in the early part of the Seventeenth Century expresses surprise at finding green the favourite colour for boots and shoes in Persia, inasmuch as in Turkey it was quite unlawful. This is the colour of the great Persian boot (39) in my engraving. [Illustration: BOOTS AND SHOES.--V. 44. Peaked Patten (Fifteenth Century); 45, 46. Venetian Pattens (Sixteenth Century); 47. Indian Patten.] I have remarked upon the formless square-toed shoes of the Empire. We meet the same uncomely shapes in the shoes worn by the women of Manilla in the Philippines, and in those which come from Mexico. The latter are entirely in open-work, and made of vegetable silk. It would be interesting to notice how far a flat broad-toed shoe is indicative of societies formed or existing under repressive rule, religious or political, and how far the pointed shoe bears witness to a state of things tending towards dissolution and social anarchy. From Mexico we pass naturally to the shoes of the Red Men. The mocassin is the simplest form of shoe, being a wrapping of leather or cloth fitted to the foot, and more or less beautifully ornamented. These shoemakers did not expect the foot to suit itself to the shoe, but modelled the shoe to the foot. This is as much as to say that they had the idea of rights and lefts. The early ornaments are simple forms embroidered on the leather; but in some the work is very pretty, and the designs are laboriously worked on cloth in silk or in beads. The nearest approach to the simplicity of American-Indian cordwainery is to be found in the sacerdotal shoe. There are several gorgeous specimens at Cluny, one of which belonged to the excellent pontiff Clement XIV. (1765–1773). Of crimson velvet, or red or white satin, embroidered with gold, the shapes of these shoes take us back to the time when the first bishops and deacons of Rome wore the _carbatina_, the shoe of the ordinary citizen. It consisted of a piece of ox-hide which did duty as a sole, and was then raised at the sides and over the toes, and tied upon the instep and round the lower part of the leg by straps which pass through holes made for the purpose. This