Of course one of the worst of our pinching shoes is matrimony, when marriage means bondage and not union. The mismated wife or husband never leaves off, willingly or unwillingly, squeezing the tender places; and the more the pressure is objected to the worse the pain becomes. And nothing can relieve it. A country gentleman, hating the dust and noise of London, with all his interest in his county position and all his pleasure in his place, and a wife whose love lies in Queen's balls and opera-boxes, and to whom the country is simply a slice out of Siberia wherever it may be; a hearty hospitable man, liking to see his table well filled, and a wife with a weak digestion, irritable nerves and a morbid horror of society; a pushing and ambitious man, with a loud voice and an imposing presence, and a shrinking fireside woman, who asks only to glide unnoticed through the crowd and to creep noiselessly from her home to her grave--are not all these shod with pinching shoes, which, do what they will, go on pinching to the end, and which nothing short of death or the Sir James Hannen of the time can remove? The pinching shoe of matrimony pinches both sides equally--excepting indeed, one of the two is specially phlegmatic or pachydermatous, and then the grip is harmless; but, as a rule, the ring-fence of marriage doubles all conditions, and when A. walks hobbled, B. falls lame, and both suffer from the same misfit. However, the only thing to do is to bear and wear till the upper-leather yields or till the foot takes the required shape; but there is an eternity of pain to be gone through before either of these desirable ends comes about; and the instinct which dreads pain, and questions its necessity, is by no means a false one. For all that, we must wear our pinching shoes of matrimony till death or the Divorce Court pulls them from our feet; which points to the need of being more careful than we usually are about the fit beforehand.