Just when I was in the deepmost confidence of Uncle Andrew, who was by then confined to his bed and suffering the treatment of Doctor Clews, his stories stopped abruptly and he began to lament the wastry of his life. If the thing had been better acted I might have been impressed, for our follies never look just like what they are till we are finally on the broad of our backs and the Fell Sergeant's step is at the door. But it was not well acted; and when the wicked Uncle Andrew groaned over the very ploys he had a week ago exulted in, I recognised some of my mother's commonest sentiments in his sideways sermon. She had got her quondam Andy, for lang syne's sake, to help her keep her son at home; and he was doing his best, poor man, but a trifle late in the day. “Uncle Andrew,” said I, never heeding his homily, “tell me what came of the pock-marked tobacco planter when you and the negro lay in the swamp for him?” He groaned hopelessly. “A rotten tale, Paul, my lad,” said he, never looking me in the face; “I rue the day I was mixed up in that affair.” “But it was a good story so far as it went, no further gone than Wednesday last,” I protested. He laughed at that, and for half an hour he put off the new man of my mother's bidding, and we were on the old naughty footing again. He concluded by bequeathing to me for the twentieth time the brass-bound chest, and its contents that we had never seen nor could guess the nature of. But now for the first time he let me know what I might expect there. “It's not what Quentin might consider much,” said he, “for there's not a guelder of money in it, no, nor so little as a groat, for as the world's divided ye can't have both the money and the dance, and I was aye the fellow for the dance. There's scarcely anything in it, Paul, but the trash--ahem!--that is the very fitting reward of a life like mine.” “And still and on, uncle,” said I, “it is a very good tale about the pock-marked man.” “Ah! You're there, Greig!” cried the rogue, laughing till his hoast came to nigh choke him. “Well, the kist's yours, anyway, such as it is; and there's but one thing in it--to be strict, a pair--that I set any store by as worth leaving to my nephew.” “It ought to be spurs,” said I, “to drive me out of this lamentable countryside and to where a fellow might be doing something worth while.” “Eh!” he cried, “you're no' so far off it, for it's a pair of shoes.” “A pair of shoes!” I repeated, half inclined to think that Uncle Andrew was doited at last. “A pair of shoes, and perhaps in some need of the cobbler, for I have worn them a good deal since I got them in Madras. They were not new when I got them, but by the look of them they're not a day older now. They have got me out of some unco' plights in different parts of the world, for all that the man who sold them to me at a bonny penny called them the Shoes of Sorrow; and so far as I ken, the virtue's in them yet.”