for generations past; for, although invariably women are made to bear all the blame which is given in respect to articles of dress, in the matter of pointed toes the men outdo us entirely in their extravagant outrages on nature.
Even intelligent men have not the slightest idea of what the natural shape of the foot is; and a clever young fellow, who, by-the-bye, had on a pair of patent leathers in the extreme of the pointed fashion, on my condemning this fashion, endeavoured to convince me that I was in the wrong in the following way: "Now, look at my hand," he said, spreading it flat on the table, with the fingers lying close to each other. "You see that the fingers on each side slope up to a point constituted by the middle finger. Well, the foot is exactly like the hand; so you see the fashionable boot is a natural and proper shape."
Nor, indeed, is it very surprising that people should be so ignorant as to what is the proper shape of the foot, for such a thing as a natural foot is hardly to be found except among the street boys in our gutters, from whose lower extremities the fashionable world avert their gaze. Not even the feet that we see represented in pictures or by sculptors are natural feet, for, although to a certain extent idealized by the artists, they really represent models which have been cramped by ordinary ill-fitting boots, and I have seen even in books of anatomy illustrations of so-called normal feet where the great toe was directed outwards, evidently by the fault of
