"Then you will understand how I came to ask myself: 'Do sickly, crippled,
and deformed men measure things by a different standard to that of sound
men? And might it not be a useful task to investigate how their
estimates differ from ours?'"

"And have your researches among your cripples led to any results?"

"To many important ones," the old man declared; but Philippus interrupted
him with a loud: "Oho!" adding that his friend was in too great a hurry
to deduce laws from individual cases. Many of his observations were, no
doubt, of considerable interest... Here Rufinus broke in with some
vehemence, and the discussion would have become a dispute if Paula had
not intervened by requesting her zealous host to give her the results, at
any rate, of his studies.

"I find," said Rufinus very confidently, as he stroked down his long
beard, "that they are not merely shrewd because their faculties are early
sharpened to make up by mental qualifications for what they lack in
physical advantages; they are also witty, like AEesop the fabulist and
Besa the Egyptian god, who, as I have been told by our old friend Horus,
from whom we derive all our Egyptian lore, presided among those heathen
over festivity, jesting, and wit, and also over the toilet of women.
This shows the subtle observation of the ancients; for the hunchback
whose body is bent, applies a crooked standard to things in general.
His keen insight often enables him to measure life as the majority of men
do, that is by a straight rule; but in some happy moments when he yields
to natural impulse he makes the straight crooked and the crooked
straight; and this gives rise to wit, which only consists in looking at
things obliquely and--setting them askew as it were. You have only to