more discreet in future. Notwithstanding
which, I cannot admire the pattens. Patins
look effeminate, sabots do not.

And yet, the pattens themselves are neither
dainty nor dandified; perhaps truth would
urge that they really are not so effeminate as
the slippers of a London fashionable. I am
told that a long walk in pattens is violent
exercise for certain muscles of the leg and
thigh. They are strong and heavy pieces of
machinery, supported on circles of iron seven
inches in diameter, English measurement, and
are fastened to the feet witli buckle and strap,
like skates. By the way, skates are not
considered effeminate, and patins, in French, also
mean skates, sometimes specified as patins
d'Holland, or Dutch pattens. It is not easy to
pronounce a philosophical condemnation of
foreign customs, which involve no point of
religion or morality by their breach or their
observance. A man may wear pattens or not,
according to his conscience, without deeply
sinning in either case. Sabots may assume
themselves to be indisputably allowable.

Sabots are divided into two great classes.
Firstly, the coarse or gros sabots, large clumsy
things worn by the very poorest people and
on the dirtiest occasions, by little children as
well as by their parents: a pair costing about
fourteen sous, or sevenpence. Secondly, the
sabots of a superior quality, or fins sabots,
more highly finished and of better materials:
the price ranging from two francs, or twenty
pence the pair, upward, without reckoning
what may be called the trimmings. The
most usual material of both qualities is
beech- wood; but, for the sake of lightness,
the gros sabots are often made of willow, and
of poplar. Fine sabots, for the ladies and
children of well-to-do citizens, are often
made of walnut-tree, of hornbeam, and of ash,
as well as of beech. Whatever wood is used
requires to be slightly seasoned, and is kept
accordingly for a year after being felled.
With gros sabots, the process of seasoning is
often summarily concluded by smoking them,
like hams and tongues and Yarmouth
bloaters, after they are cut out from the
parent block.

Though sabots are more comfortable things
than those who have never tried them would
believe, nobody can tell exactly where the
shoe pinches but those that wear it. There
are evident symptoms that the top of the
instep is the place where the sabot causes the
greatest uneasiness. The ploughman relieves
the pressure by sticking a wisp of hay or
straw between the wood and the upper part
of his foot—as he " whistles o'er the lea "—the
straggling tuft of dry grass, which thus
adorns each sabot, answering the ornamental
purpose of a buckle, a rosette, or
shoe-strings of broad ribbon. With the same
object, ladies' sabots are cut away, on the
upper part, so considerably, that a leather
strap, called the bride, passes over the instep
and is nailed to the sole of the sabot, to prevent
it from slipping off the foot at every
step. The bride (pronounced like the English
word, "breed"), is often stamped with handsome
patterns, besides being padded and stuffed.
Such sabots are called sabots-souliers, or shoe
sabots; for gentlemen, something similar is
prepared, and styled sabots-bottes, or
boot sabots. Many are so highly wrought with
carving and colouring, that it is difficult to
distinguish them, by the sight alone, from
boots, shoes, and gaiters of leather.

Sabotier, is a maker of sabots. All sabots are
made by hand—none by machinery. The very
large body of sabotiers in France consists of
great people and little people: those who carry
on an extensive business, which, branching from
various forests in distant departments, is
centralised in Paris; and those who merely keep
up a snug little trade at home, just sufficient
to employ themselves and families; or, not
having families, two or three journeymen.
Almost all sabotiers, also, are dealers in
firewood, which is, in fact, the waste and the
trimmings of their raw material. They
sometimes, likewise, go a little into the trade of
boisselier, or maker of wooden utensils, and
sell wooden shovels, and such like; but the
instances are rare.

Every February, the head, or rnaster-
sabotiers, go to Paris, where each of them
has, not customers, but employers, amongst
the large dealers in sabots, who give their
orders according to what they want—the
style of sabot, and the nature of the material.
Beech, birch, walnut, and now and then aspen
wood, have each their turns of favour. The
market-price is then fixed for the commercial
year, which runs from March to March. The
delivery of the manufactured article begins in
May, and usually ends in the March of the
following year; the reckoning is made in lots
of twenty pairs.

The orders thus given, are executed in the
principal forests of France, in very widely situated
localities—the neighbourhoods of
Valenciennes, in the North Department; of Fougères
in Brittany; and of the Puy-de-Dôme in the
Central Region. A "sabotier of the Limousin"
is almost a proverbial expression. In these, as
in other forests which are national property,
there are government sales, by auction, of the
wood, which is periodically cut when it has
attained a certain size. The head sabotiers
collect their workmen together in the forest
itself, on the spots where they have made
their purchases. An encampment is formed;
the men ply their trade under the greenwood
tree, instead of in close factories.In some
cases, large temporary wooden buildings
are run up;in others, huts and cabins of
leaves and branches constitute the sylvan
village. The men who are married, work in
company with their wives and such of their
children as are old enough to be of any use
to them. The Saturday of every week is
pay-day. We may fancy their amusements;
truffle-hunting, if they are in beech woods,