Crutch

“ I got over it, though, and I also got over wearing goggles on an express train.
To this day, I can not help shuddering as I contemplate what a frightful appearance I must have presented with those goggles on. A good-looking young man like myself, on a crutch, with such an immense round patch on either side of his nose, must have been a marvel to look at. ”

“ Shortly before leaving the city, I was taking my usual stroll, when, turning the corner of Broadway and Fulton street rather abruptly, I accidentally planted my crutch fairly upon the unfortunate toes of an elderly gentleman. He proved to be one of the irascible sort—and no doubt it did hurt like the deuce—and he turned angrily toward me, brandished a cane, and vociferated:
“****’* fire and ***nation! If you were not a one-legged man I’d knock your head off!” ”

“ A little girl, quite a little girl in a blue-hooded cape, and a white apron, was walking with crutches over a plain. With every step she took her crutches grew and raised her like stilts. They soon became higher than the poplars on the river's bank. A woman who saw my surprise said to me: "Don't you know that in the spring crutches grow? But there are times when the size increases with alarming rapidity." ”

“ Crack! went the ball, stopped in its flight, and falling to the ground.
Snap! echoed the crutch end, and went flying straight through the air, striking a little boy about twenty feet away.
The lad was playing "Duck on the Rock," and was nearly knocked over. The crutch end struck his cheek, scratching and bruising it, and he gave a cry of pain. ”

“ When I asked the man for the boat, he looked at my crutch and said:
“Can you row?”
I told him that reminded me of a lady friend of mine, who shortly after my return from the “field of glory,” asked me if I didn’t find my corporeal defect very inconvenient about eating. “Why shouldn’t I row?” said I. “A man don’t hold the oars with his toes, any more than he holds his knife and fork in them when eating at the table—which would look rather odd, and render it necessary for him instead of sitting in the usual manner to take a somewhat novel position.” ”

“ These are the Genii of the Mountain-dew; and their hidden enginery, depend on't, is not far off, but buried in the bowels of some brae. See!—a faint mist dissipating itself over the heather! There—at work, shaming the idle waste, and in use and wont to break even the Sabbath-day, is a Still!
Do we look like Excisemen? The Crutch has indeed a suspicious family resemblance to a gauging-rod; and literary characters, like us, may well be mistaken for the Supervisor himself. But the smuggler's eye knows his enemy at a glance, as the fox knows a hound ”

“ But a crutch, of however good wood it may be made, and however good a lame man may be at using it—still, a crutch at its best is but an outside additament; it is not really and originally a part of a man’s very self at all. And yet a lame man is not himself without his crutch. ”

“ And a very soft voice within seemed to say very softly, but very distinctly, "There are your crutches." "Oh," she gasped to herself as though it took away her very breath, "my crutches? I couldn't give my crutches; they're my life." ”

“ Then it seemed as if the staff would be lighter and more easily handled than the crutches. But perhaps the chief reason was that he would not appear so great a cripple with the staff as with the crutches; for above all things else the cripple desires to appear not a cripple, and to seem to walk as if nothing were the matter with him. ”

“ The next case was a peasant of fifty-eight, a cripple on crutches. Without his crutches he was doubled up, and could only shuffle with his feet on the ground. After the Prince had asked the usual questions and had prayed, he ordered the kneeling man to stand up, his crutches having been removed. As he was unable to do so, the miracle-worker seemed irritated, and repeated his order in an angry tone. ”

“ If the old man with the crutches represents the feeble-minded believers, the question to be answered is, how did they come to depend upon the use of crutches in the first place? Was it not more cruel to teach them to depend upon crutches? Are not those who prevent the healthy development of the limbs to enhance the sale of crutches even more cruel than those who despise their use? To bring a man to a state of dependence; to terrorize him into fear; to fetter his faculties so that he cannot train them into service; to arrest his evolution ”

“ One fact had repeatedly struck me as significant, and that was the circumstance that every morning between six and half-past, as already narrated, the same cripple went down the street; and in connexion with this, within the last few days of the time, a curious coincidence had revealed itself to me. From the tapping of his crutches on the stones I discovered that while one was shod with iron, the other was not. Now where and when had I noticed that peculiarity in a cripple before? ”

“ My interest is to point out to you that you can walk, and please throw away all those crutches. If you are really handicapped, I wouldn't advise you to do any such thing. But you are made to feel by other people that you are handicapped so that they could sell you those crutches. Throw them away and you can walk. That's all that I can say. "If I fall...." — that is your fear. Put the crutches away, and you are not going to fall. ”

“ Don't wait till the last minute—don't wait till your rupture makes you absolutely helpless—don't wait till good-for-nothing trusses cripple you up so you can scarcely drag around at all—don't wait till it's too late for a Cluthe Truss, an operation or anything else to save you. ”

“ It seemed to the desperate man that hours passed as he clung doggedly to the huge trunk which trembled and shivered and plunged wildly at the pounding impact, when suddenly it brought up against a half-submerged rock, stopped dead, grated and jarred at the crash of following logs, poised for an instant, and then slanted into deeper water, while up the man's leg shot a twisting, wrenching pain, sickening—nerve-killing in its intensity. ”

“ Hitch fell, and men stepped on him. All men slipped and slid in blood, crushed each other, dragged each other down, struck each other—and all heaved and cursed and shouted and hammered and tore at the shuddering tangle of human flesh and bone. ”

“ They are set round about her, as keepers of fields: because she hath provoked me to wrath, saith the Lord.
4:18. Thy ways, and thy devices have brought these things upon thee: this is thy wickedness, because it is bitter, because it hath touched thy heart.
4:19. My bowels, my bowels are in pain, the senses of my heart are troubled within me, I will not hold my peace, for my soul hath heard the sound of the trumpet, the cry of battle.
4:20. Destruction upon destruction is called for, and all the earth is laid waste: my tents are destroyed on a sudden, and my pavilions in a moment. ”

“ The pain is exquisite; blood leaps out at the first cut, and strong men usually faint after thirty or forty strokes. Strange to say, the worst part of it is not the blow itself, but the whistling of the rod through the air as it rushes to its mark. The groans of my older comrades, whose gasps and prayers I could hear through the walls of the cell, helped me bear the agony until unconsciousness mercifully came to the rescue. ”

“ The wind and the sea rose together, and the cutter had to sheer off lest she should be wrecked. The men on the rock clung, as best they might, to the half-fastened shaft, and a desperate struggle ensued between brute nature and that passive fortitude which is greater than brute nature,—all through the night into the morning, all through the day into the night again, until the third day, when the storm abated and they were saved. ”

“ These illustrations show Groin Rupture as it first appears, and how it gradually grows worse and descends into the privates (both male and female) when neglected or not properly protected, as when a worthless truss or other appliance is worn which frequently or occasionally lets the rupture come out. ”

“ A deep abyss that he remembered as being at a considerable distance from the mountain's brink, once spanned by a foot-bridge, now showed the remnant of its jagged, shattered walls at the extreme verge of the precipice.
A cold chill of horror benumbed his senses. Basil, the wife, the children,—where were they? A terrible death, surely, to be torn from the warm securities of the hearth-stone, without a moment's warning, and hurled into the midst of this frantic turmoil of nature, down to the depths of the gap,—a thousand feet below! ”

“ Then heavy blows are struck, pieces of swinging sticks go flying, people are knocked down and trampled under foot, every one gets spattered with blood and dirt; screams groans, and brutal cries of all sorts produce a tumult beyond description. ”

“ To burst is to break by pressure from within, as a bombshell, but it is used also for the result of violent force otherwise exerted; as, to burst in a door, where the door yields as if to an explosion. To crush is to break by pressure from without, as an egg-shell. To crack is to break without complete severance of parts; a cracked cup or mirror may still hold together. Fracture has a somewhat similar sense. In a fractured limb, the ends of the broken bone may be separated, tho both portions are still retained within the common muscular tissue. ”

“ He falls, and, as he falls, the light from the pit leaps up, catching his bloody hand, and the fatal knife, and the long ears of his fool’s-cap, and gleaming in his despairing eyes; while all the air is filled with chattering and mowing demons, whose eyes and teeth also glitter white and cruel. And the horror of the man’s face is terrible. ”

“ The crush on the paths higher up on the hillside was not so great, but the fighting of man against man was incessant and bitter. I could see them clambering up the steep sides of the ledges, with bleeding nails, distorted features and locked teeth. ”

“ The clamor oppressed the spirit, the dust fretted the nostrils and blinded the eyes, the sweltering heat baked and exhausted the body, and everything-buildings, men, pavement—seemed strained, breaking, ready to burst, losing patience, on the verge of exploding into some immense catastrophe, some outbreak, after which one would be able to breathe freely and easily in the air refreshed by it. ”

“ And the poor brutes seem to fully realize their danger and ours, as with wary steps and tremulous ears, emitting almost human signs, with more than brute caution they deliberately place 55 one foot before the other, calculating seemingly at each step the desperate chances and intensely conscious of our mutual peril. ”

“ Ten minutes before she had been a dainty thing in her coat of white, now she looked like an ancient wreck with her scorched and smoke-grimed sides on which the melted paint hung in ugly, dropsical blisters. The worst of it was there was no redress for the damages done her. So cunning was the scheme that it bore all the semblance of an accident, though the wrathful lad knew it was anything but that. He could imagine scoundrels chuckling to themselves in the closed shack and his blood boiled in his veins. How we would like to repay them for the fright and damage. ”

“ But now, caught in the tremendous crush of humanity, by the thousands upon thousands of human beings who thronged the streets, carried this way and that by currents and counter-currents, they were likely to be carried anywhere. And should the crush become too great, they might well be rendered unconscious by the vise-like pressure of the throng. ”

“ Once drawn within the down-draught of that hideous vortex, a whole army might be destroyed more certainly than even by the manifold death-dealing contrivances of modern science, a whole legislature lost in a single hour of ghastly and unhonoured catastrophe!
Oh, the sickening sweep of that descent! With what sensations of awe, horror, and strange, distraught admiration, must a doomed victim, once within that whirl, gaze about him!—for he has leisure to observe. The downward draught of those swift, wide-sweeping, spirally-whirling water-walls is comparatively slow. ”

“ If we were brutalized we should be brutes ashore and brutes consistently on board. We are neither one nor the other. It’s this—that one branch of us is starved, stunted, so that it can’t grow, and consequently the other branch develops abnormally. ”

“ The fearful roar which broke from the giant's throat as he disappeared, the crashing and thudding of his body as it dashed from point to point of the jagged rocks, made even those hardened savages sicken and turn pale, but worst of all was the crash with which he came to the bottom, where his body struck a rock with such violence that it was dashed into a thousand pieces, and his spouting blood dyed the sea crimson for miles and miles around. ”

“ Has Pan led your brutes where they stumble?
"Has Dana numbed pain of the child-bed, or Wotan put hands to your plough?
"What matter your foolish reply! O, man, standing lone and bowed earthward,
"Your task is a day near its close. Give thanks to the night-giving God."
Slowly the darkness falls, the broken lands blend with the savage;
The brute-tamer stands by the brutes, a head's breadth only above them. [164]
A head's breadth? ”

“ At the same time, the thuddings of the earth grew more severe than ever and they were accompanied by rumblings, roars, and reverberations of terrifying force and insistency. Crash after crash burst upon our ears as if from some remote storm-center—crash after crash that echoed and re-echoed eerily in that narrow corridor, until our ear-drums ached from the strain and our agitated hearts pumped with a thumping rapidity. ”

“ The persistent rush of the flood filled every inch of space with sound of an awful, even threatening character, suggesting further devastation and death. The men engaged in their dreadful task of lifting crushed corpses from under the stones that had fallen upon them, were almost overcome and rendered incapable of work by the appalling clamour, which was sufficient to torture the nerves of the strongest ”