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"Look," he said, "it's been stamped upon by a man wearing hob-nailed boots made in Ireland a man of five feet nine and a half inches high " "One minute, Mr. Kent," interrupted the Inspector, greatly excited, "I don't quite get it." "The depth of the dint proves the lift of his foot," said Kent impatiently, "and the lift of the foot indicates at once the man's height.
"Marry, to this conclusion," answered the knight; "that either this my Discretion, or I myself, am little less than bewitched; for, instead of receiving my accost with a gratifying bow, answering my regard with a suppressed smile, accompanying my falling off or departure with a slight sigh honours with which I protest to you the noblest dancers and proudest beauties in Feliciana have graced my poor services she hath paid me as little and as cold regard as if I had been some hob-nailed clown of these bleak mountains!
Edwards, find me the man who wore these boots and the mystery is solved!" At that very moment a heavy step, unmistakably to the trained ear that of a man in hob-nailed boots, was heard upon the stair. The door opened and a man stood hesitating in the doorway. Both Kent and Edwards gave a start, two starts, of surprise. The man was exactly five feet nine and a half inches high.
They carry no musket in ordinary life, nor no long-pointed pole; they wear no wide green-lined cloak; they wear no peaked black felt hat, no leathern gaiters reaching to the knee, no goat-skin breeches with the hair side out, no hob-nailed shoes, no prodigious spurs.
She talks without movement, without expression; her voice never varies, it flows on, and on, and on, like a great resistless river. Four young artisans come clamping along in their hob-nailed boots, and seating themselves at one of the rude wooden tables, call for beer. With their arms round the waist of the utterly indifferent Fraulein, they shout and laugh and sing.
She cleaned her boots as carefully as she could in the hall. They were square-toed and hob-nailed and most unsuitable for a drawing-room. Mrs. Fanshawe literally quailed before them. "You shouldn't have parquet floors," Lady Staines remarked, holding out her hand; "in the country, it's the ruin of them unless you wear paper soles," she glanced searchingly at Mrs. Fanshawe's and Estelle's feet.
Not once had she hesitated or turned from the beaten trail, but she had gone down after the graveyard shift. That went on at eleven and her tracks were superimposed on the hob-nailed boot-marks of the miners.
But Grady, if he noticed his guest's annoyance, paid no heed to it; and I began to suspect that the Frenchman's courtesy and good-breeding had ended by rubbing Grady the wrong way, they were in such painful contrast to his own hob-nailed manners. Whatever the cause, there was a certain malice in the smile he turned upon the Frenchman.
Firmin went out, leaving the door open behind him; and they heard his hob-nailed boots clatter and squeak on the stone floor of the outer hall. "Charolais?" said the Duke idly. "I don't know the name. Who are they?" "A little while ago Alfred announced two gentlemen. I thought they were Georges and Andre du Buit, for they promised to come to tea.
After a hard day's scything or woodcutting on slopes so steep that the resistance of one's hob-nailed boots seems like that of soft soap, I have felt profoundly healthy and ready to go to bed without listening to any lyrics on the Alps. And even the thought of Tennyson's "awful rose of dawn" would not have roused me before the labour of the next day.
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