In the morning when I left my room, I saw placed in line before the door
his boots and mine. His were little laced-up boots rather out of shape,
and dulled by the rough usage to which he subjects them. The sole of the
left boot was worn thin, and a little hole was threatening at the toe of
the right. The laces, worn and slack, hung to the right and left.
Swellings in the leather marked the places of his toes, and the
accustomed movements of his little foot had left their traces in the
shape of creases, slight or deep.

Why have I remembered all this? I really do not know, but it seems to me
that I can still see the boots of the dear little one placed there on the
mat beside my own, two grains of sand by two paving stones, a tom tit
beside an elephant. They were his every-day boots, his playfellows,
those with which he ascended sand hills and explored puddles. They were
devoted to him, and shared his existence so closely that something of
himself was met with again in them. I should have recognized them among
a thousand; they had an especial physiognomy about them; it seemed to me
that an invisible tie attached them to him, and I could not look at their
undecided shape, their comic and charming grace, without recalling their
little master, and acknowledging to myself that they resembled him.

Everything belonging to a baby becomes a bit babyish itself, and assumes
that expression of unstudied and simple grace peculiar to a child.

Beside these laughing, gay, good-humored little boots, only asking leave
to run about the country, my own seemed monstrous, heavy, coarse,
ridiculous, with their heels. From their heavy and disabused air one
felt that for them life was a grave matter, its journeys long, and the
burden borne quite a serious one.