With a basketful of the figs of the first tree he trudged to the nearest town, still clad in his peasant’s dress, and cried, ‘Fine figs! fine figs! who’ll buy my beautiful ripe figs!’
All the people ran out to see the new fruit-seller, and his figs looked so tempting that plenty of people bought of him. Among the foremost was the host of the inn, with his wife and his buxom daughter, and every one of them, as they ate the figs their noses began to grow and grow till everyone of them had a nose fully a yard long.
Then there was a hue and cry through the whole town, everyone with his yard of nose dangling and waggling, came running out, calling, ‘Ho! Here! Wretch of a fruit-seller!’[5]
But our fruit-seller had had the good sense to foresee the coming storm, and had taken care to get far out of the way of pursuit.
But the next day he dressed himself like a doctor, all in black, with a long false beard, and came to the same town, where he entered the druggist’s[6] shop, and gave himself out for a great doctor.
‘You come in good season!’ said the druggist. ‘A doctor is wanted here just now, if ever one was, for to everyone almost in the town is grown a nose[7] so big! so big! in fact, a full yard of nose! Anyone who could reduce these noses might make a fortune indeed!’
‘Why, that’s just what I excel at of all things. Let me see some of these people,’ answered our pretended doctor.
The druggist looked incredulous at a real remedy turning up so very opportunely; but at the same moment a pretty peasant girl came into the shop to buy some medicine for her mother; that is, she would have been pretty if it had not been for the terrible nose, which made a fright of her. The false doctor was seized with compunction when he saw what a fright his figs had made of this pretty girl, and he took out some figs of the other tree and gave her to eat, and immediately her tremendous nose grew less, and less, and less, and she was a pretty girl again. Of course it need not be said that he did not give her the figs in their natural state and form; he had peeled and pounded, and made them up with other things to disguise them.
The druggist no sooner saw this wonderful cure than he was prompt to publish it, and there was quite a strife who should have the new doctor the first.
It was the innkeeper who succeeded in being the first to possess himself of him. ‘What will you give me for the cure?’ said the strange doctor.