ng of hands naturally brings one to the subject of feet, which was
intended originally to be the theme for the last half of this chapter,
but unfortunately I find I have devoted so much space to your hands that
there is but little room left for your feet and so far as your feet are
concerned, we must content ourselves on this occasion with a few general
statements.

Feet, I take it, speaking both from experience and observation, are even
more trouble to us than hands are. There are still a good many of us
left who go through life without doing anything much for our hands but
with our feet it is different. They thrust themselves upon us so to
speak, demanding care and attention. This goes for all sizes and all
ages of feet. From the time you are a small boy and suffer from stone
bruises in the summer and chilblains in the winter, on through life
you're beset with corns and callouses and falling of the instep and all
the other ills that feet are heir to.

The rich limp with the gout, the moderately well to do content
themselves with an active ingrown nail or so, and the poor man goes out
and drops an iron casting on his toe. Nearly every male who lives to
reach the voting age has a period of mental weakness in his youth when
he wears those pointed shoes that turn up at the ends, like sleigh
runners; and spends the rest of his life regretting it. Feet are
certainly ungrateful things. I might say that they are proverbially
ungrateful. You do for them and they do you. You get one corn, hard or
soft, cured up or removed bodily and a whole crowd of its relatives
come to take its place. I imagine that Nature intended we should go
barefooted and is now getting even with us because we didn't. Our poor,
painful feet go with us through all the years and every step in life is
marked by a pang of some sort. And right on up to the end of our days,
our feet are getting more infirm and more troublesome and more crotchety
and harder to bear with all the time. How many are there right now
who have one foot in the grave and the other at the chiropodist's?
Thousands, I reckon.

Napoleon said an army traveled on its stomach. I don't blame the army,
far from it; I've often wished I could travel that way myself, and
I've no doubt so has every other man who ever crowded a number nine and
three-quarters foot into a number eight patent-leather shoe, and then
went to call on friends residing in a steam-heated apartment. As what
man has not? Onc