“Then he took a bottle of plant juice that he knew helped to stop bleeding, and he got ready his bandages, and his keenest knives, and his saw, and a bowl of water, and then he thought for a bit, and ended by asking the monks which of them would help him, but they all shrank away and turned pale, all but the prior, who said he would help, and then they went into the poor fellow’s cell.”
Old Brownsmith stopped here, and kept on stroking one of the cats for such a long time, beginning at the tip of his nose and going right on to the end of his tail, that I grew impatient.
“And did he perform the operation?” I said eagerly.
“Yes, bravely and well, but of course very clumsily for want of experience. He cut off the leg, Grant, right above where the bone was splintered, and all the terrible irritation was going on.”
“And the poor fellow died after all?” I said.
“No, he did not, my lad; it left him terribly weak and he was very low for some days, but he began to mend from the very first, and I suppose when he grew well and strong he had to make himself a wooden leg or else to go about with a crutch. About that I know nothing. There was the poor fellow dying, and there was a gardener who knew that if the broken place were cut Nature would heal it up; for Nature likes to be helped sometimes, my boy, and she is waiting for you now.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll do it directly,” I said, glancing at the stump I had sawn off, and thinking about the swineherd’s leg, and half-wondering that it did not bleed; “but tell me, please, is all that true?”
“I’m afraid not, Grant,” he said smiling; “but it is my idea—my theory about how our great surgeons gained their first knowledge from a gardener; and if it is not true, it might very well be.”
“Yes,” I said, looking at him wonderingly as he smoothed the fur of his cats and was surrounded by them, rubbing themselves and purring loudly, “but I did not know you could tell stories like that.”
“I did not know it myself, Grant, till I began, and one word coaxed out another. Seriously, though, my boy, there is nothing to be ashamed of in being a gardener.”