Now this was curious, for Austin was a hopeless cripple.  Up to the age of sixteen, he had been the most active, restless, healthy boy in all the countryside.  He used to spend his days in boating, bicycling, climbing hills, and wandering at large through the woods and leafy lanes which stretched far and wide in all directions of the compass.  One of his chief diversions had been sheep-chasing; nothing delighted him more than to start a whole flock of the astonished creatures careering madly round some broad green meadow, their fat woolly backs wobbling and jolting along in a compact mass of mild perplexity at this sudden interruption of their never-ending meal, while Austin scampered at their tails, as much excited with the sport as Don Quixote himself when he dispersed the legions of Alifanfaron.  Let hare-coursers, otter-hunters, and pigeon-torturers blame him if they choose; the exercise probably did the sheep a vast amount of good, and Austin fully believed that they enjoyed it quite as much as he did.  Then suddenly a great calamity befell him.  A weakness made itself apparent in his right knee, accompanied by considerable pain.  The family doctor looked anxious and puzzled; a great surgeon was called in, and the two shook their heads together in very portentous style.  It was a case of caries, they said, and Austin mustn’t hunt sheep any more.  Soon he had to lie upon the sofa for several hours a day, and what made Aunt Charlotte more anxious than anything else was that he didn’t seem to mind lying on the sofa, as he would have done if he had felt strong and well; on the contrary, he grew thin and listless, and instead of always jumping up and trying to evade the doctor’s orders, appeared quite content to lie there, quiet and resigned, from one week’s end to another.  That, thought shrewd Aunt Charlotte, betokened mischief.  Another consultation followed, and then a very terrible sentence was pronounced.  It was necessary, in order to save his life, that Austin should lose his leg.

What does a boy generally feel under such circumstances?  What would you and I feel?  Austin’s first impulse was to burst into a passionate fit of weeping, and he yielded to it unreservedly.  But, the fit once past, he smiled brilliantly through his tears.  True, he would never again be able to enjoy those glorious ramps up hill and down dale that up till then had sent the warm life coursing through his veins.  Never more would he go scorching along the level roads against the wind on his cherished bicycle.  The open-air athletic days of stress and effort were gone, never to return.  But there might be compensations; who could tell?  Happiness, all said and done, need not depend upon a shin-bone more or less.  He might lose a leg, but legs were, after all, a mere concomitant to life—­life did not consist in legs.  There would still be something left to live for, and who could tell whether that something might not be infinitely grander and nobler and more satisfying than even the rapture of flying ten miles an hour on his wheel, or chevying a flock of agitated sheep from one pasture to another?