Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/413

 manner, is curved inward. Were it not for the respite and the liberty accorded at night—which mitigate but do not remove the evil—the feet of Englishmen and more especially of Englishwomen, who cramp them in order that they may appear small and pretty, would be as little serviceable for wholesome exercise as those of the Chinese ladies, whom we all agree to laugh at; seeing the mote in our neighbour's eyes, but not in our own. It has been cynically suggested that the boot and shoemakers are in league with the chiropodists and doctors to damage our health by means of our feet; and that they are allowed a per-centage by the profession, for the callosities which they create by the faulty construction of our nether integuments. But cynics are privileged to believe the worst of everything and everybody; and doubtless the Crispins, great and small, would be quite as willing to make boots and shoes on natural principles, so as to allow for the healthful play and motion of the foot, as to make unnatural ones, if Fashion and Custom would but run in that direction. But Custom is like the mountain, not to be moved by the blast of a trumpet; and Fashion is more obstinate in having its own way, in spite of reason and remonstrance, than all the mules, pigs, and asses that ever existed since the creation of the world.

I end in the spirit with which I began. Better a clean hand than a dirty glove; better bare feet than clouted shoon and ragged stockings; and better, far better, feet such as Nature intended, than the feet which we owe to Fashion and the bootmakers.

THE BROWN-PAPER PARCEL. IN FIVE CHAPTERS. CHAPTER III.

and cares had vanished like a dream of the night, when Mary awoke before dawn, to hear her own dear village bells pealing out their welcome to Christmas Eve, and awoke to the glad consciousness that she was really at home. "Rejoice in the Lord daily, and again I say rejoice," was the text that rose in her mind, setting itself to the tune of those joy-bells all the time she was dressing, with noiseless movements not to disturb the sleeping Cilla. Her morning prayer over, she stole downstairs, and betook herself to the kitchen, where the one sleepy little school-girl who formed the whole of the domestic staff was lighting the fire. When Mr. Mackworth came down, it was to hear his daughter's happy voice singing carols, as she bent all her energies to the arrangement of as tempting a breakfast as the simple materials were capable of making. Mrs. Mackworth, resting in the happy assurance that "her eldest" was now at home to see to everything, was able to enjoy an extra hour of well-earned rest. When Cilla appeared, shivering and miserable, long after every one else had begun breakfast, even her piteous little face brightened at sight of the daintily spread breakfast table and the good fire; and she condescended to express approval of the crisp toast which Mary had prepared for her. It never occurred to any one, apparently, that her appetite might have been better, and her hands and feet less frozen, if she likewise had been bestirring herself to help in the thousand and one household tasks which there were so few to perform. Mary would have been the last to entertain so sacrilegious and disloyal an idea; for, ever since she was herself a sturdy brown child of six, and Cilla a delicate golden-haired fairy of three, she had learnt to consider that hers was the useful, and her sister's the ornamental, department in life—a theory which the little lady herself had thoroughly adopted. It was as a matter of course that she sank after breakfast into the solitary arm-chair, with her feet on the fender, looking all that was graceful and pretty (in spite of rather untidy hair, and clothes which would have been the better for a little more brushing and mending) while her mother betook herself to her eternal mending of hose and clothes, and Mary flitted about, here, there, and everywhere, in her oldest dress, neat through all its shabbiness, rapidly and quietly establishing order and comfort, wherever she went.

There is no need to write in detail the history of the next few days. The curate's family came in for no Christmas gaieties, and for a very scanty amount of Christmas cheer: but they were busy in ministering to the comfort and pleasure of all the poor around them, and even Cilla roused up into fitful interest.

Each busy day was followed by a cheery evening. The curate would then rouse himself out of his usual gravity, and prove the truth of his children's old saying, that, when he liked, nobody could be such fun as papa. And Harry and Mary and Cilla all chattered at once, and the gentle mother smiled and listened, and Jack and Laurry got between everybody and the fire, and were ordered to bed, and refused to go: and altogether it was very pleasant. For whatever their faults might be, these people thoroughly loved and believed in each other, and even Cilla would with all her heart have endorsed the proverb, that "Home is Home, be it never so homely."

"Mary!" she exclaimed one darkening afternoon, nearly a week after Christmas Day: "here is this mysterious