Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/175

 and painful. The centre of the sole should rise above both heel and toe on the inside of the shoe, so as to preserve the arch of the foot.

Our next subject is a tender one—not love, as you will at once guess, but—corns. They are the Nemesis which visits infraction of the rules we have just laid down. So common are they that in all our large cities there are individuals who devote themselves to their extraction, and make a living by it. These gentlemen are not always too implicitly to be relied upon. Some, indeed, are skilful and reputable specialists, but the majority are ignorant and tricky, thinking of nothing but how to "make business," that immortal principle which Charles Dickens says is the only stable and entirely certain one in English law. We had recently in our hands a small book published by one of them in which he urgently dissuades any one from cutting their own corns, but always to come to the celebrated chiropodist, Dr., to have it done ($5.00, if you please).

This is charlatanism. Every person can not only cut, but cure their corns, if they will take the trouble. They can even learn to extract them on the feet of others, but not readily on their own. The method is simple, the operation painless, and we shall describe it.

The only instruments needed are a pair of small steel forceps, and two or three blunt-pointed steel or silver