I looked down at him, and he went on: "You may depend upon it that during the storm some poor fellow had been
caught out in the forest by a falling limb of a tree, one of the boughs
of which pinned him to the ground and smashed his leg."
"An oak-tree," I said, quite enjoying the fact that he was inventing a
story.
"No, boy, an elm. Oak branches when they break are so full of tough
fibre that they hang on by the stump. It is your elm that is the
treacherous tree, and snaps short off, and comes down like thunder."
"An elm-tree, then," I said, paring away.
"Yes, a huge branch of an elm, and there the poor fellow lay till some
one heard his shouts, and came to his help."
"Where he would be lying in horrible agony," I said, trimming away at
the bough.
"Wrong again, Grant. Nature is kinder than that. With such an injury
the poor fellow's limb would be numbed by the terrible shock, and
possibly he felt but little pain. I knew an officer whose foot was
taken off in a battle in India. A cannon-ball struck him just above the
ankle, and he felt a terrible blow, but it did not hurt him afterwards
for the time; and all he thought of was that his horse was killed, till
he began to struggle away from the fallen beast, when he found that his
own leg was gone."
"How horrible!" I said.
"All war is horrible, my boy," he said gravely. "Well, to go on with my
story. I believe that they came and hoisted out the poor fellow under
the tree, and carried him up to the old priory to have his broken leg
cured by one of the monks, who would be out in his garden just the same
as we are, Grant, cutting off and paring the broken boughs of his apple
and pear trees. Then they laid him in one of the cells, and his leg was
bound up and dressed with healing herbs, and the poor fellow was left to
get well."
"And did he?" I said.
"Then the gardener monk went out into the garden again and continued to
trim off the broken branches, sawing these and cutting those, and
thinking all the while about his patient in the cell.
"Then the next day came, and the poor fellow's relatives ran up to see
him, and he was in very great agony, and they called upon the monks to
help him, and they dressed the terrible injury again, and the poor
fellow was very feverish and bad in spite of all that was done. But at
last he dropped off into a weary sleep, and the poor people went away
thinking what a great thing it was to have so much knowledge of healing,
while, as soon as they had gone the monk shook his head.