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Show CRIPPLED SOLDIERS. Dancing with a. Wooden Lcg-Thc Itching of an Absent Toe One. Legged Men on the Iff arch. One of the most remarkable things to me, said a physician of prominence, is that the old soldiers of the war bear the mementoes of hot conflicts, the remembrances remem-brances of days or weeks or months of suffering and misery with such unconcern. Most men who wear wooden legs or cork legs do it with the impression that the limbs lost in battle are still a part ot themselves. The other night at a dance, one of the most graceful waltzers on the floor was a man who had lost his leg at New Hope Church, and yet there was probably not a lady in the room who thought for a moment that she danced with a wooden-legged man. There are other remembrances of various va-rious conflicts that can not escape observation. obser-vation. A closed eye, an ugly scar, a clipped nose, a broken jaw, or a distorted chin are not the sort of things to make any man cheerful, and yet I never heard any soldier thus disfigured complain or grumble in public, and I have known cases in which the bearer of such disfigurement dis-figurement was accused of carrying his mark through some disgraceful brawl, rather than as a memento of the struggle in which he played the part of a hero. THE ITCHING OF AN ABSENT TOE. There is one man in the city who, in the second year of the war, had the tip of his nose and his middle toe carried away by one shot. He had thrown himself him-self down for rest on a side hill just inside in-side the skirmish line, when a stray rebel bullet took him lengthwise, as it were, went through his cap brim, clipped an eighth of an inch off his shapely nose, and went through the end of his shoe, cutting off squarely his middle toe. His nose is all right now except a persistently pale speck on the end, but the missing toe comes back like a ghost to make him nearly frantic at times. I have seen him jump from his chair in the office, unbutton his shoe, kick it as high as the ceiling, and dance around like a madman. People who do not know the story of the missing toe are very apt to lump to the conclusion that my friend is erratic as well as eccentric, and it is not very often that he makes an explanation. explana-tion. He says it is bad enough to have a finger or toe itch when you can get at it, but to have a toe take an itching spell and know that it isn't there and that you can't get at it even if vou could reach 400 miles, and to have it keep up that irritating, ir-ritating, tantalizing, exasperating itching itch-ing for ten or fifteen minutes and in haon no chance of getting at it is too much for human nature. ONE-LEGGED MEN ON A MARCH. The funniest thing in the business, said a one-armed stalwart, is to see a lot of one-legged fellows on a march. Not long ago at a regimental reunion a squad of veterans, each of whom had lost a leg or j part of a leg, determined to march in the procession. They had all sorts of appliances, appli-ances, and each one was proud of his own substitute for the leg that nature had given him. When the band struck up one of the old marching tunes we were on level ground, and all these lame veterans vet-erans moved off with as stately a step as if they had never been wounded. I rejoiced re-joiced greatly in the thought that thev would demonstrate .that cork legs and wooden stubs answered all the purposes of soldiering. But there came a change in the elevation eleva-tion of the street, and my one-legged squad were in disorder at once. In going up the incline more than half the wood en urcorK appliances s got out of order, and the spectacle of these old fellows trying try-ing to keep time was ludicrous enough to make any man laugh and pitiful enough to make most people cry, but they joked and laughed, dropped out for a minute adjusted their wooden legs, and were again m the ranks. They really believed that they could march as well as any one could, and I note that most of the older boys, now gray-headed and rheumatic, rheu-matic, believe they can march fifteen or twenty miles at a stretch without fatigue At all event whenever occasion offers they attempt an exploit of the kind and make believe that the sickness that follows fol-lows is caused by the weather |