Boots and shoes indeed, came before stockings almost everywhere, the advantages of clean stockings as receivers for candies and other eatables being a comparatively new discovery. In Belgium to this day the children give their shoes an extra fine polish on Christmas Eve, fill them with hay, oats, carrots, for Santa Klaus’s white horse, and put them on the table, or set them in the fireplace. The room is then carefully closed and the door is locked. In the morning a strange thing is found to have happened! The furniture is all turned topsy-turvy, the fodder has been removed from the shoes and in its place the good little children find all sorts of nice things and the bad ones only rods of birch and bits of coal. Boots and shoes are also in use in many parts of France. But here, as a general rule, it is the good little Jesus (le bon petit Jesus) who comes down the chimney to fill all this footgear with sweetmeats. Formerly this custom extended to Paris. A French journalist named Charton thus describes the sights that met his eye on Christmas eve in Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century: [Illustration: Santa Claus: “Whew! I suppose if I don’t remember those poor boys in Wall Street they’ll complain to Teddy.” Drawing by C. J. Taylor.] “Lo! what a strange thing! Before all the mantelpieces of Paris are ranged, with a wonderful symmetry, charming little shoes, pretty little _bottines_, miniature slippers, and, as the extremities of the _faubourgs_, poor little sabots! It will be asked, what all those tiny little boots and shoes are doing there? There are enough of them to cover the feet of all the inhabitants of the vast kingdom of Lilliput. What are they doing there? They are waiting for a beautiful little luminous hand to descend from heaven to fill them with preserved fruits and bonbons! In the olden time the presents intended for children were fastened to the two ends of the Yule Log. Later an attempt was made to introduce into France the Christmas tree, which, in a large portion of Europe, has superseded the Yule Log. But it is most usual to keep to the simple custom of filling the little shoes with bonbons, which more than one mother of the laboring classes has had the foresight to reserve for that purpose. We will not venture to say that, whilst the good mother or the elder sister is stealthily approaching the hearth and stooping down, one of the little sleepers, kept awake with expectation, does not open his eyelids slily, and say to himself: ‘Ah! I was sure it was not the little Jesus!’ But the prudent child will take care not to confess that he has discovered the mystery; he has too much interest in being cheated next Christmas day; and in a few hours the room will ring with his cries of false surprise but real gratification.”