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When I was to Bosting I saw horses switch their tails just that way." What surprised Ralph was to see that Flat Creek went to meeting. Everybody was there the Meanses, the Joneses, the Bantas, and all the rest. Everybody on Flat Creek seemed to be there, except the old wooden-legged basket-maker.
There you might see the offscourings of the recently finished war, old soldiers, rusty, wooden-legged: there, sailors, ripe for any kind of mischief; there, the drunken population of a neighboring grogshop, staggering helter-skelter to the scene, and tumbling over one another at the Doctor's feet.
But so far as I was concerned this odd settlement of pleasure-squatters was a mystery as well as a surprise, enhanced rather than mitigated by an imaginative suggestion or so I had received from the wooden-legged man at Shaphambury. I saw the thing as no gathering of light hearts and gay idleness, but grimly after the manner of poor men poisoned by the suppression of all their cravings after joy.
Marie would be turned away, and he would be left a victim in the hands of his mother, and of that stiff, wooden-legged militaire; a penniless victim, left to mope about the place without a grain of influence or a morsel of pleasure. "But what can we do?" he exclaimed again, as he once more met Marie's searching eye.
For meanwhile Tom Bodger, stick in hand, had made his way back on to the pier, and just as the boy was going his fastest something followed him faster, in the shape of the wooden-legged sailor's well-aimed cudgel, which spun over the surface of the pier, thrown with all the power of Tom's strong arm, and the next instant it seemed to be tangled up with the boy's legs, when down he went, kicking, yelling, and struggling to get up.
In the midst of Irving's mock-heroics, he always preserves a substratum of good sense. An instance of this is the address of the redoubtable wooden-legged governor, on his departure at the head of his warriors to chastise the Swedes:
The wooden-legged man turned me about so as to exhibit the placard; and having afforded time for a full survey of it, turned me about again, with my face to Mr. Creakle, and posted himself at Mr. Creakle's side. Mr. Creakle's face was fiery, and his eyes were small, and deep in his head; he had thick veins in his forehead, a little nose, and a large chin.
There were said to be things heard, seen, and felt, even in the brightest summer day, which commended the spot to the creatures that fear mankind, but not their spectres. The very last of all to approach it now would have been the two rollicking tars who had trodden their wooden-legged watch around it.
A work dedicated apparently to this object, which I have been unable to find in the body, is mentioned under a very tantalising title. This is nearly as tantalising as the wooden-legged Britisher's explanation to the inquisitive Yankee, who solemnly engaged to ask not another question were he told how that leg was lost, and was accordingly told that "it was bitten off."
The post used to come into Nuncombe Putney at about eight in the morning, carried thither by a wooden-legged man who rode a donkey. There is a general understanding that the wooden-legged men in country parishes should be employed as postmen, owing to the great steadiness of demeanour which a wooden leg is generally found to produce.
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