was wore so thin and so smooth, that, if he'd been Hal Brook[1] his
self, he couldn't help slipping."

[Footnote 1: Doubtless he meant Al Borak, the name of Mahomet's night
mare.]

"You mean," said the judge, "that the horse, instead of shoes, had
merely slippers?"

Peradventure, the alleged failures may be similarly accounted for;
the party, in each case, having perhaps nailed up, not a shoe, but a
slipper, the learned distinction respecting which was thus judicially
recognised. The deed which the devil signed, must, like a penal statute,
be construed strictly. It says nothing of a slipper; and it has been
held by all our greatest lawyers, from Popham and Siderfin, down to
Ambler and Walker, that a slipper is not a shoe.

Another solution suggests itself. Possibly the horse-shoe, even if
genuine, was not affixed until after the Wicked One had already got
possession. In that case, not only would the charm be inefficacious
to eject him, but would actually operate as a bar to his quitting the
premises; for that eminent jurisconsult, Mephistopheles himself, has
distinctly laid it down as "a law binding on devils, that they must go
out the same way they stole in." Nailing up a shoe to keep the devil
out, after he has once got in, is indeed too late; and is something like
the literary pastime of the "Englishman," who kept on showing cause
against the Frenchman's rule, long after the latter had, on the motion
of his soldiers, already made it absolute with costs.

There is one other circumstance the author begs to refer to, from a