Just then a customer came in, and the host had to go and attend upon him, and while he was gone the wife called the servants, and bade them turn the doctor out, and give him a good drubbing into the bargain, saying, ‘I’ll have some other doctor to cure me!’
So he left them, and went on curing people’s noses all day, till he had made a lot of money. Then he went away, but limping all the time from the beating he had received. The next day he came back dressed like a Turk, so that no one would have known him for the same man, and he came back to the same inn, saying he, too, could cure noses.
The mistress of the inn gave him a hearty welcome, as she was very anxious to find another doctor who could cure her nose.
‘My treatment is effectual, but it is rude,’ said the pretended Turk. ‘I don’t know if you’ll like to submit to it.’
‘Oh yes! Anything, whatever it may be, only to be rid of this monstrous nose,’ said the hostess.
‘Then you must come into a room by yourself with me,’ said the pretended Turk; ‘and I have a stick here made out of the root of a particular tree. I must thump you on the back with it, and in proportion as I thump you the nose will draw in. Of course it will hurt very much, and make you cry out, so you must tell your servants and people outside that however much you may call they are not to come in. For if they should come in and interrupt the cure, it would all have to be begun over again, and all you had suffered would go for nothing.’
So the hostess gave strict orders, saying, ‘I am going into this room with the Turk to be cured by him, and however much I may call out, or whatever I may say, mind none of you, on pain of losing your places, open the door, or come near the room.’
Then she took the Turk into a room apart, and shut the door. The Turk no sooner got her alone than he made her lie with her face downwards on a sofa, and then—whack, whack, whack![8] he gave her such a beating that she felt the effects of it to the end of her days.
Of course it was in vain she screamed and roared for help; the servants had had their orders, and none of them durst approach the room. It was only when she had fainted that the Turk left her alone and went his way.
But she never got her nose cured, and he married the pretty peasant girl who was the subject of his first cure.