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"I will break thy cockerel head for that speech," said Blunt, furiously. He stooped as he spoke, and picked up a heavy clog that lay at his feet. It was no insignificant weapon either. The shoes of those days were sometimes made of cloth, and had long pointed toes stuffed with tow or wool. In muddy weather thick heavy clogs or wooden soles were strapped, like a skate, to the bottom of the foot.
Yet he would not have traded his freedom, he would have told you, for any woman, for a home or for children. To be foot loose, to go where fancy called him, to have no ties no clogs upon his precious liberty, that was what he loved. He was fond of women, too. He liked being with them and he liked measuring each one he met with his ideal, a hazy creature who probably did not exist.
Enoch Peake had arranged this daring item in the course of his afternoon's business at Cocknage Gardens, Mr Offlow being an expert in ratting terriers, and Mrs Offlow happening to be on a tour with her husband through the realms of her championship, a tour which mingled the varying advantages derivable from terriers, recitations, and clogs. The affair was therefore respectable beyond cavil.
But on account of heavy taxation, high customs' dues, and other clogs to free commerce, the people are sinking deeper and deeper into poverty and wretchedness, and, except in the capital, there is a general retrograde movement.
As the floor of the hut could not be too much trodden, in the absence of planks and bricks, Charles and the boys gave it a first treading now, as soon as the six biggest stakes were driven in. Like all their peasant neighbours who were not barefoot, they wore wooden clogs; and with these all three stamped and tramped with might and main.
But when this goddess threw off her bath-gown, and came bounding into the ring as gracefully as the clogs she wore on her slippers would let her, she was much more modestly dressed than most goddesses. What I am trying to say, however, is that, while she stood there by the band, she no more interested the musicians than if she were their collective sister.
They are all very much alike, these houses in Flanders; all seem to contain the same mangled remains of simple, homely occupations. Strings of onions, old straw hats, and clogs, mixed with an assortment of cheap clothing, with perhaps here and there an umbrella or a top hat. That is about the class of stuff one found in them.
Some who are prone to run away, have iron fetters riveted around their ancles, sometimes they are put only on one foot, and are dragged on the ground. Others have on large iron collars or yokes upon their necks, or clogs riveted upon their wrists or ancles. Some have bells put upon them, hung upon a sort of frame to an iron collar.
In summer the women and children of the rural communities usually went barefoot so that the soles of their feet grew as tough as pigskin; the men sometimes did likewise, but more frequently they wore, in the fields or in the forest, clogs made of cowhide. On the week-days of summer every one wore a straw hat which the women of the household spent part of each winter in plaiting.
Many are the instances in which families have been raised to wealth in the first generation, launched into ruinous expense in the second, and disappeared in the third, being again reduced to poverty. Hence the Lancashire proverb, "Twice clogs, once boots." The first man wore clogs, and accumulated a "a power o' money;" his rich son spent it; and the third generation took up the clogs again.
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