Those Times and These by Irvin S. Cobb — Read

OF all the human legs ever seen in our town I am constrained to admit / that Mr. Herman Felsburg's pair were the most humorous legs. When it / came to legs -- funny legs -- the palm was his without a struggle. Casting / up in my mind a wide assortment and a great range of legs, I recall no / set in the whole of Red Gravel County that, for pure comedy of contour / or rare eccentricity of gait, could compare with the two he owned. In / his case his legs achieved the impossible by being at one and the same / time bent outward and warped inward, so that he was knock-kneed at a / stated point and elsewhere bow-legged. And yet, as legs go, they were / short ones. For a finishing touch he was, to a noticeably extent, / pigeon-toed.

I remember mighty well the first time Mr. Felsburg's legs first acquired / for me an interest unrelated to their picturesqueness of aspect. As / I think backward along the grooves of my memory to that occasion, it / defies all the rules of perspective by looming on a larger scale and in / brighter and more vivid colours than many a more important thing which / occurred in a much more recent period. I reckon, though, that is because / our Creator has been good enough to us sometimes to let us view our / childhood with the big, round, magnifying eyes of a child.