It is curious to learn that the "glass slipper" in
Cinderella, of which from our youth upwards we never questioned the authen- ticity, though well aware that no one who was not a protigle of fairies would think of dancing in such an article, was not part of the original story, but has been due to a misunderstanding of a word used in the French version of the tale. The slipper, we have been told by a writer in the Sunday Times, supported by " Littre's Dictionary," was originally a slipper trimmed with a particular kind of rare fur, called in French, vair,—the fur of a creature of tht. weasel kind. But this fur not being known to ordinary French story-tellers, they spoke of a pantoufle de verre,— a glass slipper,—by a sort of unconscious pun. Certainly the new reading is far more creditable to the sagacity of Cinderella's godmother, as a purveyor of comfortable clothes ; for whatever magic power the glass slippers might have had of surviving a dance, it is impossible that they could have been comfortable to the feet, and must have resulted in all probability in serious corns.
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