When at last I went I was surprised to find that outside one of the two
little windows of his shop another name was painted, also that of a
bootmaker-making, of course, for the Royal Family. The old familiar
boots, no longer in dignified isolation, were huddled in the single
window. Inside, the now contracted well of the one little shop was more
scented and darker than ever. And it was longer than usual, too, before
a face peered down, and the tip-tap of the bast slippers began. At last
he stood before me, and, gazing through those rusty iron spectacles,
said:
"Mr.-----, isn'd it?"
"Ah! Mr. Gessler," I stammered, "but your boots are really too good,
you know! See, these are quite decent still!" And I stretched out to
him my foot. He looked at it.
"Yes," he said, "beople do nod wand good hoods, id seems."
To get away from his reproachful eyes and voice I hastily remarked: "What
have you done to your shop?"
He answered quietly: "Id was too exbensif. Do you wand some boods?"
I ordered three pairs, though I had only wanted two, and quickly left. I
had, I do not know quite what feeling of being part, in his mind, of a
conspiracy against him; or not perhaps so much against him as against his
idea of boot. One does not, I suppose, care to feel like that; for it
was again many months before my next visit to his shop, paid, I remember,
with the feeling: "Oh! well, I can't leave the old boy--so here goes!
Perhaps it'll be his elder brother!"
For his elder brother, I knew, had not character enough to reproach me,
even dumbly.
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