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There are plenty of dwarfs all over Italy, but it did seem to me that in
Milan the crop was luxuriant. If you would see a fair average style of
assorted cripples, go to Naples, or travel through the Roman States.
But if you would see the very heart and home of cripples and human
monsters, both, go straight to Constantinople. A beggar in Naples who
can show a foot which has all run into one horrible toe, with one
shapeless nail on it, has a fortune--but such an exhibition as that would
not provoke any notice in Constantinople. The man would starve. Who
would pay any attention to attractions like his among the rare monsters
that throng the bridges of the Golden Horn and display their deformities
in the gutters of Stamboul? O, wretched impostor! How could he stand
against the three-legged woman, and the man with his eye in his cheek?
How would he blush in presence of the man with fingers on his elbow?
Where would he hide himself when the dwarf with seven fingers on each
hand, no upper lip, and his under-jaw gone, came down in his majesty?
Bismillah! The cripples of Europe are a delusion and a fraud. The truly
gifted flourish only in the by-ways of Pera and Stamboul.
That three-legged woman lay on the bridge, with her stock in trade so
disposed as to command the most striking effect--one natural leg, and two
long, slender, twisted ones with feet on them like somebody else's
fore-arm. Then there was a man further along who had no eyes, and whose
face was the color of a fly-blown beefsteak, and wrinkled and twisted
like a lava-flow--and verily so tumbled and distorted were his features
that no man could tell the wart that served him for a nose from his
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