One day he sat sorrowfully at his window, when two Cossacks came up, dismounted, seized him, and hurried him off at full speed. The surgeon thought his last hour had arrived. But the Cossacks brought him safely to a hut. There sat some officers round a punch bowl, and among them a stern man in large boots.
"Surgeon," said the latter, short and sharp, "out with your forceps; I have toothache."
Bäck ventured to ask which tooth it was that ached.
"You argue," said the man impatiently.
"No, I don't," replied the surgeon, and pulled out the first tooth he got hold of.
"Good, my boy! March," said the other, and the surgeon was dismissed with ten ducats.
He had acquired another important merit by pulling out the tooth of the hero Suvaroff.
The surgeon's next considerable journey was to St. Petersburg, where he obtained an appointment in a hospital, and made a little fortune.
Thus passed four or five years. The surgeon was now thirty-five. He said to himself,
"It is not sufficient to have preserved the Swedish fleet, Gustave III., and Armfelt; to have had an interview with Napoleon, and pulled out a tooth for Suvaroff. One must also have an aim in life." And he began to realise that he had a Fatherland.