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Updated: May 20, 2025
"Someone was too lazy to open the door and come in." "What is it?" asked Tom, bending over Steve's shoulder. "It's from that idiot Durkin," chuckled the latter. "'Got just what you fellows need. Shoe-blacking stand, two brushes, all complete. Cheap. Come and see it. P. Durkin." "A shoe-blacking stand!" laughed Tom. "Say, he must have seen your shoes, Steve." "Must have seen yours, you mean!"
A volume of Shakespeare lies on top of a heaping full waste basket that was once used to bring peaches to market, and an ancient copy of Worcester's Dictionary shares places in an adjacent chair with the poet's old and familiar soft gray hat, a newly darned blue woolen sock and a shoe-blacking brush.
A public character, stopping over night with a friend in the country, the maid-of-all-work tells her mistress, after the guest departs, "I have read so much about him, never expecting to see him; little did I think I should have the honor of brushing his boots this morning." Happy girl in her work, knowing that all service is honorable. Even shoe-blacking, we see, has its rewards.
"Oh, Allie!" she exclaimed with a little ripple of childish laughter, "do you remember how absurdly poor we were when we were first married, and how you refused to take any help from your family? And do you remember that silly old pair of black trousers that used to get so thin on the knees and how I used to put shoe-blacking underneath so the white wouldn't show through?"
The town was full of characters who delighted in their own eccentricities, and who were always on public view. One individual possessed a remarkably intelligent pony who every morning, without guidance from his master, patronized one of the shoe-blacking stands to get his front hoofs polished. He presented each one in turn to the foot-rest, and stood like a statue until the job was done.
In fact, when one comes to read the story of his life, and to know that he was really and lastingly ashamed of having once put up shoe-blacking as a boy, and was unable to forgive his mother for suffering him to be so degraded, one perceives that he too was the slave of conventions and the victim of conditions which it is the highest function of his fiction to help destroy.
The convenient term quadroon, for instance, instead of "four annas in the rupee," is quite unknown; the consequence is that every one from Anna Maria de Souza, the "Portuguese" cook, a nobleman on whose cheek the best shoe-blacking would leave a white mark, to pretty Miss Fitzalan Courtney, of the Bombay Fencibles, who is as white as an Italian princess is called an "Eurasian."
In order to make the scoring of points more vivid and visible to the audience, it was decided, after some hesitation, that the gloves should be coated with shoe-blacking. Bobbles realized that his salvation lay in quick attack and the seizure of every possible opportunity, as well as in his ability to escape the onslaughts of the heavy-weight.
"Tell you what I'll do," pursued Durkin, undismayed. "I'll fetch it over to your room and you can see how it looks. It's got perfectly wonderful tones of of old rose and and blue and " "Nothing doing, Durkin. We don't need any rugs." "You're missing a bargain," warned the other. "Say, I've still got that shoe-blacking stand I told you about.
In anticipation of this journey, Netta went one evening, in company with Emma Lee, to pay Mrs John Marrot a friendly visit, ostensibly for the purpose of inquiring after the health of baby Marrot, who, having recently fallen down-stairs, swallowed a brass button and eaten an unknown quantity of shoe-blacking, had been somewhat ailing.
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