even a woodchuck that had got its leg broken in a trap was not an
outcast to them; and as for beggars and tramps, not one passed "Gunn's,"
from June till October, that was not hailed by the old squire from under
his lilac-bush, and fed by Hetty. Plenty of sarcastic and wholesome
advice the old gentleman gave them, while they sat on the ground eating;
and every word of it sank into Hetty's wide-open ears and sensible soul,
developing in her a very rare sort of thing which, for want of a better
name, we might call common-sense sympathy. To this sturdy common-sense
barrier against the sentimental side of sympathy with other people's
sufferings, Hetty added an equally sturdy, and she would have said
common-sense, fortitude in bearing her own. This invaluable trait she
owed largely to her grandfather's wooden leg. Before she could speak
plain, she had already made his cheerful way of bearing the discomfort
and annoyance of that queer leg her own standard of patience and
equanimity. Nothing that ever happened to her, no pain, no deprivation,
seemed half so dreadful as a wooden leg. She used to stretch out her own
fat, chubby, little legs, and look from them to her grandfather's. Then
she would timidly touch the wooden tip which rested on the floor, and
look up in her grandfather's face, and say, "Poor Grandpa!"

"Pshaw! pshaw! child," he would reply, "that's nothing. It does almost
as well to walk on, and that's all legs are for. I'd have had forty legs
shot off rather than not have helped drive out those damned British
rascals."

Not even for sake of Hetty's young ears could the old Squire mention
the British rascals without his favorite expletive. Here, also, came
in another lesson which sank deep into Hetty's heart. It was for his
country that her grandfather had lost that leg, and would have gladly
lost forty, if he had had so many to lose, not for himself; for