Later—when the excitement had all subsided and we sat dreaming in the warmth and glow—the doctor took little Sammy in his lap, and told him he was a very good boy, and looked deep in his eyes, and stroked his hair, and, at last, very tenderly bared his knee. Sammy flinched at that; and he said “Ouch!” once, and screwed up his face, when the doctor—his gruffness all gone, his eyes gentle and sad, his hand as light as a mother’s—worked the joint, and felt the knee-cap and socket with the tips of his fingers.
“And is this the rheumatiz the Prompt Exterminator is to cure, Sammy?” he asked.
“Ith, zur.”
“Ah, is that where it hurts you? Right on the point of the bone, there?”
“Ith, zur.”
“And was there no fall on the rock, at all? Oh, there was a fall? And the bruise was just there—where it hurts so much? And it’s very hard to bear, isn’t it?”
Sammy shook his head.
“No? But it hurts a good deal, sometimes, does it not? That’s too bad. That’s very sad, indeed. But, perhaps—perhaps, Sammy—I can cure it for you, if you are brave. And are you brave? No? Oh, I think you are. And you’ll try to be, at any rate, won’t you? Of course! That’s a good boy.”
And so, with his sharp little knives, the doctor cured Sammy Jutt’s knee, while the lad lay white and still on the kitchen table. And ’twas not hard to do; but had not the doctor chanced that way, Sammy Jutt would have been a cripple all his life.