A POOR cripple who had to go on foot to the hospital (where only he could be cured) cut a staff to help him in walking. It was the best he could get from the woods that grew by the way, and was just like those that other cripples used on that same road.

For a time, as long as the road was smooth, the staff seemed to be all that he needed; but when he came to an uneven place, he found that it did not answer. It was too short, though as long as that sort of wood grew, and it was too rough, hurting his hand as he leaned upon it. Beside this, it did not take a firm hold on the ground, but slipped from under him, giving him many falls.

After one of these falls, while he was lying prostrate and hardly able to rise, a man came to him with a pair of crutches in his hand. The man raised him up from the ground, put the crutches under his arms, and showed him how to walk with them.

And now the poor cripple was overjoyed to find that he could walk with comparative ease and with perfect safety. Yet he kept the staff that he had cut for himself, carrying it, thrust under his girdle, across his back, behind him.

He walked leaning on his crutches for a considerable distance and over a good deal of rough ground, and then came to another smooth spot.

Here a desire seized him to try his staff again. But why should he want to do this? In the first place, he had forgotten in that short space of time the falls it had before given him. Then it seemed as if the staff would be lighter and more easily handled than the crutches. But perhaps the chief reason was that he would not appear so great a cripple with the staff as with the crutches; for above all things else the cripple desires to appear not a cripple, and to seem to walk as if nothing were the matter with him.

So he tried his staff again, and for a time got along quite well.

While he was walking at his best, hardly limping, as he thought, a man came to him saying:

“How well you walk! That staff is just the thing for you. But you don’t need the crutches; why do you cumber yourself with them?”

With this the man took hold of the crutches to take them from him, but the cripple would not let go of them. The man stood and reasoned a while with him; but when he found it was of no use, he turned away, disgusted, saying, as he left him:

“Any way, you are a fool, to keep both.”

The cripple had not gone much farther, leaning on his staff, when he came to some more rough ground, where he floundered about for a while and then fell to the earth, striking his head and bringing the blood. Then he was glad that he had not parted with the crutches. He drew them out from behind him, put them under his arms, and proceeded on his way.

Now we should think that he would never trust to his staff again. But it was not so. He hardly ever came to a smooth place that he did not draw it forth and walk with it, till he learned again, by sad experience, that it would not support him; so that this was, in fact, the history of his going—toiling along with his staff and falling, and then betaking himself to his crutches once more.

At last he came to the foot of the hill on the top of which was the hospital. But the ascent of that hill! he was terrified as he looked at it. It was covered with rocks and rolling stones, and beside its steep path was a yawning chasm. He stood gazing at it for a moment, and then, as if realizing for the first time his actual needs, he drew forth his staff and cast it from him as far as his strength would send it.

Now, he had not known himself what a weight that staff had been to him, for no sooner was he rid of it than it seemed to him almost as if he had wings. Then, resting wholly on his crutches, he addressed himself to his last labor. And, truly, those who looked after him saw that he made that most difficult ascent (up to the place where he knew there was a Physician who would heal him) as if it were the easiest part of his journey.