The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1876-12-02 00:00:00

OLD BOOTS AND SHOES.

Under the above title, "A PeripatAlc" describes, in an
amusing and graphic article in the Globe, the collection of
the venous odds and ends that during the preceding twelve
months had been left by travellers in the csrriages of the
Great Northern Railway, and which are annually sold by
auction :

"Those passengers who, like myself, arrived at a
certain platform of the Great Northern Railway at
King's-cross at noon of Wednesday last must have
been considerably astonished at the suddenly altered
aspect of the place. It was as though the genius
of second-hand -wearing apparel, whose customary
haunt is in Petticoat-lane, Houndsditch, had broken
loose and invaded, and for the nonce opened shop on,
the company's premises. All along one side of the
platform wall there were suspended from hooks
bundles of old coats, bunches of vests and unmen-
tionables, umnietaleably the worse for wear, together
with a vast array of feminine gear, including
shawls, jackets, skirts, and cloaks, besides sheets,
blankets, counterpanes, railway rugs, and mackin-
toshes. The ground all about WA3 strangely strewn.
Here a heap of hats and caps, there a pile of bonnets;
there, again, bundles of dirty linen and socks and
stockings, as though made ready for the laundry,
with bundles of bags, leather and carpet, and bol-
sters and pillows, and portmanteaus and hat cases, a
large family bible, scores and hundreds of umbrellas
tied together in dozens or so, and almost as many
walking sticks and canes, and figuring most shabbily
amongst the heterogenous collection an amazing
quantity of old.boots and shoes.. • . For an obser-
vant mind, however, there was ample food for
reflection and curious speculation. It Ana easy
enough as I contemplated the amazing collection of
waifs and strays to connect much that was there
with mystery—with crimes, with forgeries, abscond-
ing bankruptcy; murder even. It was all very well
to say all the clothes you saw hanging up there, and
duly ticketed lot so and-so—the coats, the waist-
coats, and the other portions of manly attire—were
by accident or carelessness left behind them by the
owners; but were I at the head of affairs at Scotland.
yard I should require a much more satisfactory expla-
nation than that. A traveller by rail may leave his
bag, his walking-stick, his umbrella behind him. It is
' not beyond the bounds of probability that in a fit of
abstraction, having for some reason or other divested
himself of an under or over coat, he might, on
arriving at his destination, talie his departure with-
out missing it. But the same amount of latitude
cannot be allowed to waistcoats. A man journeying
by railway does not commonly strip to his braces
even in the warmest weather. How then are we to
account for entire suits being abandoned? As far as
I can see, only on one assumption—that the clothes
were once tho property of individuals who, in a
manner of speaking, found them on a particular
occasion too hot to bold them I It is no secret that
almost every day of the week men flee irons the scene
cf their commercial or other kind of wickedness. As
being the swiftest method of escape they naturally take
to the railway. But there is a swifter traveller than
the Flying Scotchman or the Wild Irishman, or any of
the fiery dragon tribe that drag a few hundred
tons at their tails at the rate of forty
Miles an hour. There is the telegraph I Like
lightning speeds the magic message to Man-
chester, 'Stop man in check suit, brown gloves, horse-
shoe in neck scarf, low-crowned black wideawake.'
But the man in the cheek suit does not wear a wide-
awake for nothing. He has a bag with him, and it is
not utterly impossible to obtain a compartment all to
one's self in cases where halfcrowns are no object.
The bag contains a suit of female attire,
even to false tresses and a hat with a veil • and, the
metamorphosis completed, the bag is cast out of win-
dow, and to official ken a man in chock is no more to
be stopped than though he had never been born. Of
course, I should nor; like to go as far as saying that all
the coats, waistcoats, esc., that figured against the
platform wall were the shed skins of so many wily
serpents who had by this means wriggled for the time
oeet of the law's clutch, but it is by no means difficult
to conceive that this branch of the annual auction may
be occasionally fed from the source indicated.
"That ninety tall hats (vide catalogue) should ap-
pear amongst the year's collection of carriage glean-
ings is, perhaps, not to be wondered at. Probably
ninety thousand male passengers during the twelve
months gladly availed thernailees of the luxury of re-
lieving their aching heads during a long journey of the
monstrous chimney pot,' wearing a lieht cap in its
stead, and what is more likely than that one in a
thousand should ultimately forget to make the unwel-
come change I It, is, perhaps, more astonishing that
during the time stated seventy of the fair sex should on
giving up their tickets, be obavious of the fact that they
were proceeding homeward bareheaded! It can only be
accounted for by the supposition that in modern times the
headgear of ladies is really an article of adornment rather
than of utility—a mere pendant and finishing off to the
work of the hairdresser, and which if laid aside by acci-
dent or for convenience would probably no more be
missed than the tassel of a cloak or a bow from a skirt
trimming. It was different in the days of our grand-
mothers. What would grandpapa have thought had
'his venerable better half one day arrived home from a
long journey innocent of the fact that she had some-
how lost or mislaid the substantial coal-scuttle shaped
thatching of straw that protected her silver hair, and
her ears as well, from the inclemency of the weather!
"Assuming that all that were discovered were pre-
served, the appearance in the catalogue of the item,
'2BO gloves,' affords us extraordinary evidence of care-
lessness on the part of the million wearers liable to the
commonest of all losses. A thousand umbrellas' tells
a different story, as does five hundred and odd walking
sticks, It is, perhaps, in these days, when even there
is a railway post-effioe, and stampers and sorters are
busy as bees as they wick through the country—it is, I
say, not particularly astonishing that a large , number
of individuals should make themselves presentable on
the road, and that the result should be a leaving behind
of 450 collars, cuffs, and shirt fronts, but how on earth
280 socks and stonkinga came to be heedlessly aban-
doned surpasses human comprehension. But the
most perplexing of all the queer features of this
auction of odds and ends appeared in the shape of
a crate— not, be it understood, a mere basket capable
of containing A bushel or so—but a receptacle square
and deep as an ordirary-siz.d kitchen table filled to
the brim with boots and shoes. Reference to the cata-
logue gives the the number as but ten short of three
hundred, not boots and shoes in pairs—that would have
been steange enough—but all odd, not cue with
a fellow it could reaonsably lay claim to. Nor must
the reader suppose that this very oddest of odd lots
was composed mainly of boots that had covered little
feet, and which might be heedlessly kicked off by their
infantine proprietors and left behind. As far as I
I could see, there was not a baby's boot lathe entire col-
lection. It appeared to be, without exception, a
gathering of adult boots exclusively—of ladies as well
gentlemen's—the well-made, fashionable boot, the
sturdy foot casing of the City man, the 'blucher' of
the mechanic, the coarse and heavy clay-encrusted
ankle jack' of the field labourer and the
navvy.' Extending, as it does, to the very
heart, and beyond to the limit and extreme
of the Black Country, a wide field is presented for such
a collection, and there, represented in mildewed leather,
was almost every grade in society from London to
Newcastle. The latter, certainly. Nobody can
Imagine hew it could have escaped from the leg to
which if properly belonged, for, having affected the
• severance, was never again recovered and restored to
the partner of its toils and travels, but there it was,
speaking for itself as plainly as its salt-eoddened upper
leather and its rusty iron-shod sole could do—the deck
boot of collier seaman. Had there been a pair, it would
not have been so extraordinary. Under the in-
fluence of liquor, their owner might have fancied
himself in his bunk, and slipped off; his boots to
turn in' for an hour's snooze. Or, again, being
London bound and in a merry mood, it might
have occurred to the bold man of Shields that a pair of
deck boots were not quite the kind of things to go
capering ashore' in, and he had prematurely shed
them before arriving at the terminus. But the fact of
its being an odd boot put these conjectures out of
' court at once, and it appeared as idle to speculate bow
it:came there as attempt to fathom the mystery of the
loneliness of the wooden-soled sharp toed clog' of
Lancashire, which had intruded itself into the leg, of
e deck-boot, as though claiming at all events some
distant relationship, and which WAS in some measure
supported by the coal-dust, which still sparkled on the
old clog's buckle-holding and in its various crevices,
bespeeadeg its last owner a man'accustomed to dig ,n
the bowels of the earth for the:.mineral the collier
vessel WAS accustomed to carry.
'They wife, however, not all of them riddles inex-
plicable that were contained in the crate. Dezi,ns
and scores of the odd boots and shoes spoke eloquently
out of the slits and gtahes" of the anguish their
wearers had endured before they and their property
parted company. There was the shapeless buckskin
shoe of the martyr to gout, the cut and hacked side-
spring and wellington which told of torture by ordeal
of corn and bunion until madness ensued, and the
leather tormentor was wrenched off the suffering
foot, never to cover it again, come what might. But
then, again, there were dainty shoes of softest kid,
and evidently as easy- fitting AS any glove, and how
did they come there? And, in the name of all that
is puzzling, how came an old brown leather topped
postilion's boot in that strange company? What
had become of the postilion and the other boot?
How should a postilion, or any relic of the most in-
veterate of the race of railway haters, be discovered
in a carriage on the line? Gretna Green is on the
northern route; could it be possible that the owner
of the topboot, despairing of a return of the profit-
able days of runaway lovers and coaches-and-fours,
had at last, goaded to insanity, stood on the bank,
the
hun
eed
ayrh
aivngi
itd hispsoltainrkg, btohoetsothaetr holisteflrthee4t
ene gb: hiontadrmol ei
fled ela eiess to his abode and
took to Ina bed and died chuckling with glee at his last
act of vengeance? Might it not lee he?—
",'at where is the use of 'red/Alia' and ifs,' and
verhapses, as odd as the orate-freight itself?
Migiet it not turn me a honest five shillings if I bid a
pound for the lot?' wee the question Mr. Abraham
asaed himself, au i having resolved that the venture
might be made, he hid up like a man, and the lot was
kuocked down to him, and there was an end of it."

of: second.'

THE LATEST SE N SATION AT
LA MORGUE.
For many daya,.pak.t thero hu,s been exhibiting.
publicly in Paris ()Ns the Globs) a spectacle-which
airooet every oerlcaPiial in tale civilised world would.
reVird with litirror and diegust,.: The rernaina.,:of a?,
woman. ehoeliingly unitlbe42• Egi
clecorupositiotn,,, have been kept On., view at the place,
known as the,gurgue—that is to say, they have been:
placed on oho, of the slabs with which This..g4Lty:
chamber hi fitted, in full sight of persons entering
it, and separated from them only by a wall of p,rfeetly
tranPl,arent glass. The oatensible object of this dis-
play is that of allowingAe identification of the bodies
thus exposed. But it is. piitwtly well known that toe
vast majority of the people;who crowd to the place are
impelled by no expectation whatever of identi tying the
victims, and go out of a mere feeling of inorbidcuriosity..
The Morgue is in point Of fact nothing more nor less
than a show-place, one of the sights or wonders of
Paris, to which strangers as well as inhabitants are
accustomed to go, very much in the same way as visitors
to London are taken to see the Tower, the Crystal
Palace, or the rooms Of Blsclame Talmud'. It is with-
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