The sedative had the desired effect.  “Well, sir, to tell you the truth,” he said, in a more human tone of voice, “I do not clearly understand what it is.”

“Exactly; and therefore I think we had better leave the cure to Nature, and not interfere with her mode of treatment.”

“Perhaps it would be better.”

“No doubt.  And now, since I have to lie here on my back, and feel rather lonely, I should like to have a talk with you.  You are not in a hurry, I hope?”

“Not at all.  My assistant knows where I am, and will send for me if I am required.”

“So you have an assistant, have you?”

“Oh, yes; a very sharp young fellow, who has been two years in the Feldsher school, and has now come here to help me and learn more by practice.  That is a new way.  I never was at a school of the kind myself, and had to pick up what I could when a servant in the hospital.  There were, I believe, no such schools in my time.  The one where my assistant learned was opened by the Zemstvo.”

“The Zemstvo is the new local administration, is it not?”

“Exactly so.  And I could not do without the assistant,” continued my new acquaintance, gradually losing his rigidity, and showing himself, what he really was, a kindly, talkative man.  “I have often to go to other villages, and almost every day a number of peasants come here.  At first I had very little to do, for the people thought I was an official, and would make them pay dearly for what I should give them; but now they know that they don’t require to pay, and come in great numbers.  And everything I give them—­though sometimes I don’t clearly understand what the matter is—­seems to do them good.  I believe that faith does as much as physic.”

“In my country,” I remarked, “there is a sect of doctors who get the benefit of that principle.  They give their patients two or three little balls no bigger than a pin’s head, or a few drops of tasteless liquid, and they sometimes work wonderful cures.”

“That system would not do for us.  The Russian muzhik would have no faith if he swallowed merely things of that kind.  What he believes in is something with a very bad taste, and lots of it.  That is his idea of a medicine; and he thinks that the more he takes of a medicine the better chance he has of getting well.  When I wish to give a peasant several doses I make him come for each separate dose, for I know that if I did not he would probably swallow the whole as soon as he was out of sight.  But there is not much serious disease here—­not like what I used to see on the Sheksna.  You have been on the Sheksna?”

“Not yet, but I intend going there.”  The Sheksna is a river which falls into the Volga, and forms part of the great system of water-communication connecting the Volga with the Neva.