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.