ken 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 vegetable