Ah, we bear many sorts of coverings over the long and weary road of life! I know of a pair of tiny shoes which you have got carefully treasured up in secret. I know how you sometimes take them out and wistfully gaze on the faded, worn, unlovely little things,--worthless to everybody else, but, oh, so dear to you! I see the trembling tear which you do not care to wipe away, as the image of the little darling who wore them comes up in all its by-gone beauty before you. They will never again be borne toddling to your side. The little feet, once encased therein, will never tread the stony walks of men. They long ago rested on their early march, never to be resumed.--Ah, how many of us would be glad to have buckled on no other than the first sandals of infancy! How many have fallen into the crevasses of the icy paths they trod! How many have trusted to their bold footing, and fallen, when the step seemed surest, down the treacherous steep! There is Mademoiselle Joliejambe;--would one suppose that the pink slippers, which terminate those silk-shod _mollets_, could be dangerous _chaussures_? My dear Madam, they are worse than the torturing boots of the old Spanish Inquisition. Better for her that she stood in a postilion's jack-boots.--She could never dance in such things?--No! and therefore were they the better; for no Swiss glacier is so slippery as that gas-lighted stage. She is slipping, Madam, into a terrible abyss, while you and I are gazing, delighted, at her entrechats and pirouettes. She is gliding into a crevasse to which Mont Blanc can furnish none so dread.--What do I mean?--Ah, my dear Madam, better, a thousand times, that her young mother had stored away the soft little shoes of her infancy to mourn over, as you do over your treasures, than have lived to see her tie on those satin things, which have borne her into the gaze of men for a brief, brilliant while, and are bearing her on into the flower-brinked snare of ruin!