ce of unhappiness to Mr.
Cinch would be a feeble and inadequate expression of his feelings. "Them
bow-legs" was a phrase into which he poured a degree of self-contempt
altogether pitiful. They were, of course, homely to look at and not in
the least serviceable. Unaided by his stout hickory stick, they could
not transport Mr. Cinch across the room. But there was no evidence that
their shape or size was due on their part to any motive of malice or of
indolence, and it seemed quite unreasonable that he should feel toward
them so harshly.

His disgust for them did not, indeed, originate with himself. It is
entirely probable that he would never have thought of despising them as
he did but for Mrs. Cinch. That excellent lady, with all her many
virtues, could never forgive those legs. Their degeneration, as she
regarded it, had not begun when she married Mr. Cinch. He was then a
slight young man and his legs were unexceptionable in size and shape.
They had become bowed and insufficient within comparatively recent
years, and she had never felt quite able to accept Mr. Cinch's
assurances that he was not at fault in the matter.

Let it not be thought that this excellent couple were wanting toward
each other in those sweet graces which so beautify the marriage
relation. They had lived and loved together nearly a quarter of a
century, and had shared in those years their full measure of joys and
sorrows. But Mrs. Cinch was not without her humors, and when she was
entertaining an acid humor she could not get her husband's unfortunate
legs out of her mind.

No matter what may have been the subject that had originally vexed her,
it was the invariable experience that those legs became the focus to
which her excited wrath was drawn, and then, indeed, it must be owned,
she was exceedingly hard to deal with. She would recall in bitter
phrases the fact that he had married her with other and honester legs,
and she would plainly intimate that in substituting these he had acted
in an unfair and unmanly way.

This was naturally distressing to Mr. Cinch. He keenly felt the
injustice of the insinuation, but at the same time his mind was filled
with a supreme loathing of his legs, and he was only deterred from going
to a hospital and from having them straightway taken off by the
reflection that an entirely legless husband was not likely to be more
satisfactory, upon the whole, than one whose legs were bowed.

It was from a domestic scene suc