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It is not two years since the sight of a person who had lost one of his lower limbs was an infrequent occurrence.  Now, alas! there are few of us who have not a cripple among our friends, if not in our own families.  A mechanical art which provided for an occasional and exceptional want has become a great and active branch of industry.  War unmakes legs, and human skill must supply their places as it best may.

Our common idea of a wooden leg is realized in the “peg” of the Greenwich pensioner.  This humble contrivance has done excellent service in its time, and may serve a good purpose still in some cases.  A plain working-man, who has outlived his courting-days and need not sacrifice much to personal appearance, may find an honest, old-fashioned wooden leg, cheap, lasting, requiring no repairs, the best thing for his purpose.  In higher social positions, and at an age when appearances are realities, in the condition of the Marquis of Anglesea, for instance, it becomes important to provide the cripple with a limb which shall be presentable in polite society, where misfortunes of a certain obtrusiveness may be pitied, but are never tolerated under the chandeliers.

The leg invented by Mr. Potts, and bearing the name of the “Anglesea leg,” was long famous, and doubtless merited the reputation it acquired as superior to its predecessors.  But legs cannot remain stationary while the march of improvement goes on around them, and they, too, have moved onward with the stride of progress.

A boy of ten years old, living in a New-Hampshire village, had one of his legs crushed so as to require amputation.  The little fellow was furnished with a “Peg” and stumped round upon it for ten years.  We can imagine what he suffered as he grew into adolescence under the cross of this unsightly appendage.  He was of comely aspect, tall, well-shaped, with well-marked, regular features.  But just at the period when personal graces are most valued, when a good presence is a blank check on the Bank of Fortune, with Nature’s signature at the bottom, he found himself made hideous by this fearful-looking counterfeit of a limb.  It announced him at the threshold he reached with beating heart by a thump more energetic than the palpitation in his breast.  It identified him as far as the eye of jealousy could see his moving figure.  The “peg” became intolerable, and he unstrapped it and threw himself on the tender mercies of the crutch.

But the crutch is at best an instrument of torture.  It presses upon a great bundle of nerves; it distorts the figure; it stamps a character of its own upon the whole organism; it is even accused of distempering the mind itself.