“A fine thought,” I said.

“But it’s not a new one.  I remember a very long time ago I heard a legend on that subject.  A very charming legend,” said the gardener, and he smiled.  “I was told it by my grandmother, my father’s mother, an excellent old lady.  She told me it in Swedish, and it does not sound so fine, so classical, in Russian.”

But we begged him to tell it and not to be put off by the coarseness of the Russian language.  Much gratified, he deliberately lighted his pipe, looked angrily at the laborers, and began: 

“There settled in a certain little town a solitary, plain, elderly gentleman called Thomson or Wilson—­but that does not matter; the surname is not the point.  He followed an honorable profession:  he was a doctor.  He was always morose and unsociable, and only spoke when required by his profession.  He never visited anyone, never extended his acquaintance beyond a silent bow, and lived as humbly as a hermit.  The fact was, he was a learned man, and in those days learned men were not like other people.  They spent their days and nights in contemplation, in reading and in healing disease, looked upon everything else as trivial, and had no time to waste a word.  The inhabitants of the town understood this, and tried not to worry him with their visits and empty chatter.  They were very glad that God had sent them at last a man who could heal diseases, and were proud that such a remarkable man was living in their town.  ‘He knows everything,’ they said about him.

“But that was not enough.  They ought to have also said, ’He loves everyone.’  In the breast of that learned man there beat a wonderful angelic heart.  Though the people of that town were strangers and not his own people, yet he loved them like children, and did not spare himself for them.  He was himself ill with consumption, he had a cough, but when he was summoned to the sick he forgot his own illness he did not spare himself and, gasping for breath, climbed up the hills however high they might be.  He disregarded the sultry heat and the cold, despised thirst and hunger.  He would accept no money and strange to say, when one of his patients died, he would follow the coffin with the relations, weeping.

“And soon he became so necessary to the town that the inhabitants wondered how they could have got on before without the man.  Their gratitude knew no bounds.  Grown-up people and children, good and bad alike, honest men and cheats—­all in fact, respected him and knew his value.  In the little town and all the surrounding neighborhood there was no man who would allow himself to do anything disagreeable to him; indeed, they would never have dreamed of it.  When he came out of his lodging, he never fastened the doors or windows, in complete confidence that there was no thief who could bring himself to do him wrong.  He often had in the course of his medical duties to walk along the highroads, through the forests and mountains haunted by numbers of hungry vagrants; but he felt that he was in perfect security.