Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE LEATHERWORKER in Eighteenth-Century _WILLIAMSBURG_ Being an Account of the Nature of Leather, & of the Crafts commonly engaged in the Making & Using of it. _Williamsburg Craft Series_ _WILLIAMSBURG_ Published by _Colonial Williamsburg_ MCMLXXVIII _The Leatherworker in Eighteenth-Century_ Williamsburg [Illustration: Illustrated capital] Once upon a time there lived in France a poet-bureaucrat by the name of Charles Perrault, who wrote fairy tales. He called one of them _Cendrillon ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre_, and ever since 1697, for that was the date of Cinderella’s appearance in modern literature, her glass slippers have been a puzzle. Not to children, of course. Generations of youngsters have matter-of-factly accepted as the most natural thing in the world that magic slippers should be of glass (_verre_). Their elders, however, being less sophisticated about such things, have learnedly quibbled over whether the slippers weren’t really supposed to be of _vair_, the costly white squirrel fur once worn only by royalty. After all, logic and reason and custom and tradition say that footwear has been made of leather since time unknown. And who ever heard of making shoes out of glass? Well, who ever heard of making bottles out of leather, for that matter? Or of fire hose made of leather? Or of leather cannons? Yet leather has been put to these and many other uses over the centuries of recorded history. A list of them would be almost endless, and so would a list of the sources of leather. The following compilation, doubtless far from complete, could have been (it was not) drawn up by an English eighteenth-century or colonial American leatherworker: _SOURCES_ cow ox calf horse sheep lamb goat kid pig dog wolf deer elk antelope moose buffalo bear wildcat rabbit muskrat beaver alligator rattlesnake _USES_