"People sneer at gardening and gardeners, Grant," said the old gentleman
to me one day. "Perhaps you may take to some other occupation when you
grow older; but don't you never be ashamed of having learned to be a
gardener."
"I'm sure I never shall," I said.
"I hope you will not, my boy, for there's something in gardening and
watching the growth of trees and plants that's good for a lad's nature;
and if I was a schoolmaster I'd let every boy have a garden, and make
him keep it neat. It would be as good a lesson as any he could teach."
"I like gardening more and more, sir," I said.
"That's right, my boy. I hope you do, but you've a deal to learn yet.
Gardening's like learning to play the fiddle; there's always something
more to get hold of than you know. I wish I had some more glass."
"I wish you had, sir," I said.
"Why, boy?--why?" he cried sharply.
"Because you seem as if you'd like it, sir," I said, feeling rather
abashed by his sharp manner.
"Yes, but it was so that I should be able to teach you, sir. But wait a
bit, I'll talk to my brother one of these days."
Time glided on, and as I grew bigger and stronger I used now and then to
go up with Ike to the market. He would have liked me to go every time,
but Mr Brownsmith shook his head, and would only hear of it in times of
emergency.
"Not a good task for you, Grant," he used to say. "I want you at home."
We were down the garden one morning after a very stormy night, when the
wind had been so high that a great many of the fruit-trees had had their
branches broken off, and we were busy with ladder, saw, and knife,
repairing damages.
I was up the ladder in a fine young apple-tree, whose branch had been
broken and was hanging by a few fibres, and as soon as I had fixed
myself pretty safely I began to cut, while when I glanced down to see if
Old Brownsmith was taking any notice I saw that he was smiling.
"Won't do--won't do, Grant," he said. "Cutting off a branch of a tree
that has been broken is like practising amputation on a man. Cut lower,
boy."
"But I wanted to save all that great piece with those little boughs," I
said.
"But you can't, my lad. Now just look down the side there below where
you are cutting, and what can you see?"
"Only a little crack that will grow up."
"Only a little crack that won't grow up, Grant, but which will admit the
rain, and the wet will decay the tree; and that bough, at the end of two
or three years, instead of being sound and covered with young shoots,
will be dying away. A surgeon, when he performs an amputation, cuts
right below the splintered part of the bone. Cut three feet lower down,
my lad, and then pare all off nice and smooth, just as I showed you over
the pruning.
"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."