"That's the way," he said, as he watched me. "That's a neat smooth
wound in the tree that will dry up easily after every shower, and nature
will send out some of her healing gum or sap, and it will turn hard, and
the bark, just as I showed you before, will come up in a new ring, and
swell and swell till it covers the wood, and by and by you will hardly
see where the cut was made."
I finished my task, and was going to shoulder the ladder and get on to
the next tree, when the old gentleman said in his quaint dry way: "You know what the first workman was, Grant?"
"Yes," I said, "a gardener."
"Good!" he said. "And do you know who was the first doctor and
surgeon?"
"No," I said.
"A gardener, my boy, just as the men were who first began to improve the
way in which men lived, and gave them fruit and corn and vegetables to
eat, as well as the wild creatures they killed by hunting."
"Oh, yes!" I said, "I see all that, but I don't see how the first
doctor and surgeon could have been a gardener."
"Don't you?" he said, laughing silently. "I do. Who but a gardener
would find out the value of the different herbs and juices, and what
they would do. You may call him a botanist, my lad, but he was a
gardener. He would find out that some vegetables were good for the
blood at times, and from that observation grew the whole doctrine of
medicine. That's my theory, my boy. Now cut off that pear-tree
branch."
I set the ladder right, and proceeded to cut and trim the injury,
thinking all the while what a pity it was that the trees should have
been so knocked about by the storm.
"Do you know who were the best gardeners in England in the olden times,
Grant?" said the old gentleman as he stood below whetting my knife.
"No, sir,--yes, I think I do," I hastened to add--"the monks."
"Exactly. We have them to thank for introducing and improving no end of
plants and fruit-trees. They were very great gardeners--famous
gardeners and cultivators of herbs and strange flowers, and it was thus
that they, many of them, became the doctors or teachers of their
district, and I've got an idea in my head that it was on just such a
morning as this that some old monk--no, he must have been a young monk,
and a very bold and clever one--here, take your knife, it's as sharp as
a razor now."
I stooped down and took the knife, and hanging my saw from one of the
rounds of the ladder began to cut, and the old gentleman went on: "It must have been after such a morning as this, boy, that some monk
made the first bold start at surgery."