I was taken up for dead.
It was, however, only a matter of broken ribs and a damaged leg. And
there is no doubt that if the local surgeon had not been allowed to
have his own way, I should soon have been cured. As it was I became a
cripple. The great central fact--the very pivot upon which all the
wheels of my life have since been turning--is that for two years
during the impressionable period of childhood I walked with crutches.
It must not be supposed that my tears--the tears which at this moment
were blotting out the light and glory of the North Sea in the
sun--came from the pain I was suffering. They came from certain
terrible news, which even my brother Frank had been careful to keep
from me, but which had fallen from the lips of my father--the news
that I was not unlikely to be a cripple for life. From that moment I
had become a changed being, solitary and sometimes morose. I would
come and sit staring at the ocean, meditating on tilings in general,
but chiefly on things connected with cripples, asking myself, as now,
whether life would be bearable on crutches.
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