If you want dwarfs -- I mean just a few dwarfs for a curiosity
-- go to Genoa. If you wish to buy them by the gross, for retail,
go to Milan. 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 hischeek-bones.
In Stamboul was a man with a prodigious head, an uncommonly long
body, legs eight inches long and feet like snow-shoes.He traveled
on those feet and his hands, and was as sway-backed as if the
Colossus of Rhodes had been riding him. Ah, a beggar has to have
exceedingly good points to make a living in Constantinople. A
blue-faced man, who had nothing to offer except that he had been
blownup in a mine, would be regarded as a rank impostor, and a
mere damaged soldier on crutches would never make a cent. It
would pay him to get apiece of his head taken off, and cultivate
a wen like a carpet sack.