FullReads

“Great heavens!” exclaimed my friend, stiflingly; “Just look at the boy! Get onto that position for a poet! Even Sweeney has fled from the sight of him!”

And truly, too, it was a grotesque pose the young man had assumed; not wholly ridiculous either, since the dwarfed position he had settled into seemed more a genuine physical condition than an affected one. The head, back-tilted, and sunk between the shoulders, looked abnormally large, while the features of the face appeared peculiarly child-like–especially the eyes–wakeful and wide apart, and very bright, yet very mild and very artless; and the drawn and cramped outline of the legs and feet, and of the arms and hands, even to the shrunken, slender-looking fingers, all combined to most strikingly convey to the pained senses the fragile frame and pixey figure of some pitiably afflicted child, unconscious altogether of the pathos of its own deformity.

“Now, mark the kuss, Horatio!” gasped my friend.

At first the speaker’s voice came very low, and somewhat piping, too, and broken–an eerie sort of voice it was, of brittle and erratic timbre and undulant inflection. Yet it was beautiful. It had the ring of childhood in it, though the ring was not pure golden, and at times fell echoless. The spirit of its utterance was always clear and pure and crisp and cheery as the twitter of a bird, and yet forever ran an undercadence through it like a low-pleading prayer. Half garrulously, and like a shallow brook might brawl across a shelvy bottom, the rhythmic little changeling thus began:

“I’m thist a little crippled boy, an’ never goin’ to grow
An’ git a great big man at all!–’cause Aunty told me so.
When I was thist a baby one’t I falled out of the bed
An’ got ‘The Curv’ture of the Spine’–‘at’s what the Doctor said.
I never had no Mother nen–far my Pa run away
An’ dassn’t come back here no more–’cause he was drunk one day
An’ stobbed a man in thish-ere town, an’ couldn’t pay his fine!
An’ nen my Ma she died–an’ I got ‘Curv’ture of the Spine!'”

A few titterings from the younger people in the audience marked the opening stanza, while a certain restlessness, and a changing to more attentive positions seemed the general tendency. The old Professor, in the meantime, had sunk into one of the empty chairs. The speaker went on with more gaiety:

“I’m nine years old! An’ you can’t guess how much I weigh, I bet!–
Last birthday I weighed thirty-three!–An’ I weigh thirty yet!
I’m awful little far my size–I’m purt’ nigh littler ‘an
Some babies is!–an’ neighbors all calls me ‘The Little Man!’
An’ Doc one time he laughed an’ said: ‘I ‘spect, first thing you know,
You’ll have a little spike-tail coat an’ travel with a show!’
An’ nen I laughed–till I looked round an’ Aunty was a-cryin’–
Sometimes she acts like that, ’cause I got ‘Curv’ture of the Spine!'”

Just in front of me a great broad-shouldered countryman, with a rainy smell in his cumbrous overcoat, cleared his throat vehemently, looked startled at the sound, and again settled forward, his weedy chin resting on the knuckles of his hands as they tightly clutched the seat before him. And it was like being taken into a childish confidence as the quaint speech continued:

“I set–while Aunty’s washin’–on my little long-leg stool,
An’ watch the little boys an’ girls ‘a-skippin’ by to school;
An’ I peck on the winder, an’ holler out an’ say:
‘Who wants to fight The Little Man ‘at dares you all to-day?’
An’ nen the boys climbs on the fence, an’ little girls peeks through,
An’ they all says: ‘Cause you’re so big, you think we’re ‘feared o’ you!’
An’ nen they yell, an’ shake their fist at me, like I shake mine–
They’re thist in fun, you know, ’cause I got ‘Curv’ture of the Spine!'”