A rich and clever man made a final bequest to his nephew. Whether this was by inscrutable design or eccentric quirk is beyond telling, but the old man concluded years of sound counsel, avuncular donations to the nepotic pocket, and humorously succinct elucidation of forthcoming tripwires in the young man's path, with a gift of worn personal articles. In a hotel room, one month before he died, the uncle requested that when he would have expired, his wife should give to their nephew a selection of bespoke shoes and shirts. Now twenty pairs of shoes had arrived, ranging from fawningly casual flops to pinched formal pumps; and in another sack were shirts across a staggering scale of cut and colour from the elegantly severe to the outlandishly emblazoned with stripy jungle cats. Because the nephew's chest, although broad, as yet lacked several staves to the uncle's barrel, the shirts were stuffed again into their bag; but the lad's feet were only a half-size shy of his benefactor's, and gladly kicked aside the footwear in the closet to make room for the slew of hand-sewn leathers far more expensive than any that graced that space.

     Yet, his favourites subsequently began to abandon him, to jettison his feet by warping in unexpected ways, by crimping, cramping or nagging at his heels with invisible, lumpy studs. He tried once or twice to toss out a pair become uncomfortable, even insolently disagreeable to the step, only to find the shoes again in his dressing room, reprieved by his wife or a maid. He had no one to whom he might pass on the footwear which, after years of complaisant compliance, suddenly was unwilling to accommodate him. His elder son's feet already were several sizes larger than his own; and his younger son, uninterested in adult styles as yet, held the promise of growing larger than his brother. One morning, the man dropped a pair of rebellious shoes in the bin in front of his house, and returned in the evening to find it perched on the stoop. Thereafter, he troubled himself no further than to relegate to a storeroom trunk whichever shoes took it upon themselves to refuse his feet.

      Because store-bought substitutes never approached the exquisite comfort conferred by his inherited cache, he strode through mid-life shod in tanned scales or in quill-specked skins, still shuffling his dwindling stock. As he grew older, three pairs only fit him: elegant blades with side-buckles, shiny evening streamers, and a brace of blowsy slippers. The predictability of his pedal apparel, professional, social, and intimate, became as constant as the course of his affairs and the worth of his advice.

      There came a time when the shoes he wore to his office began to rebel at his old man's feet. They twisted at the tongue, bowed and bayed at the sides, bent and wobbled along the rear seam where they should have given support to the heel. Annoyed, the elderly gentleman obstinately curled his toes, tried to will precision into a precarious walk, and after some weeks of valiant effort, cost his company its founder when he tripped down a flight of stairs.

      Long after the deceased had been buried, an assortment of discarded shoes still lay in the attic, undisturbed and forgotten in a trunk. One day, their late owner's eldest son, searching in a closet, came across an astonishing array of shirts in a bag. The first of these, when he tried it on, was only a trifle large. It felt smooth to the skin, as cool as marble in the shade.