"Ah! old men's boots don't go there, Sir," said the boot-maker to me
one day, rather pointedly, pointing to the toes of the boots I had
brought him for mending. As I danced home, writing another chronicle
with every springing step, the remark filled me with reflection--such
reflection, reader, as your mirror shows you when you gaze in it to
rejoice in your own beauty.
[Illustration: Published at the Bodily Head. All body and precious
little head.]
Have you kept a diary for thirty years? Dear me! And have you kept
your gas bills, your water-rates, your Christmas-cards, your writs,
your circulars of summer sales? I might never have undertaken to write
this biography if I had not chanced one evening--being unoccupied--to
break open a private desk belonging to my friend NARCISSUS, and
tearing open an envelope (sealed, and labelled "_Compromising
Postcards--to be opened before my death_,") came across these old
boot-bills, and been struck by the manner in which there lay revealed
in them the story of the years over which they ran....
* * *