Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 August 1883 — THE TOOTH-PICK SHOE. [ARTICLE]

THE TOOTH-PICK SHOE.

It must have taken a vary narrowminded man to invent the tooth-pick shoe. It is very incisive in its manner toward long-winded beaux when wielded by the extemporaneous head of tire house. The tooth-pick shoe has not that open oountenanoe and winning way so characteristic of the brogan. It is less subdued and tractable. In the giddy maze it is more wild and delirious than the stoga, which for decades has polled the Irish shin and made the jig rattle with its levity. Asa thingof comfort it is not the howling success that it might be if it were filled with sod oom and water and nature given a chance to take her course. The bunion, so dear to our heart, is not madly gone on the toothpick shoes, although the shoe has often made a “crush” upon it. As much as we think of the bunion, especially when hurt, we would just as soon part with it as we would with this narrow-minded shoe. The tooth-pick shoe was originally intended for inebriates, who wanted them so tight that snakes oould not play “pussy wants a corner” in them. They are not,as many have supposed, to be used in digging chunks of pie out of the dark caverns of our store teeth, but to enoase our feet and jam our toes into an interrogation point, and thrust our mind into sore distress and the mudhole of perdition. They are fashionable and perhaps this is the worst stigma we can thrust upon them without quoting Ten Butler. They are having their run, and first thing you know they will be run down at the heel of fashionable folly, and then, poor wasp-waisted tooth-pick shooj you will have to hobble down the back alley of the past and stumble over the high board fence of oblivion and bake in the hot sun of neglect on the frog pond environed woodpile of discarded popularity. We would that the day of tooth-pick shoes was yesterday a year ago. Blazes, how my corns do kick. Low-necked tooth-pick shoes you are abully thing a long ways off. —The Eye.