“Never in all my life. May I go to perdition! May my bowels gush out!” said Polikéy, and wept touchingly.
Polikéy went home, and for the rest of the day lay on the oven, blubbering like a calf. Since then nothing more had ever been traced to him. Only his life was no longer pleasant; he was looked upon as a thief, and when the time for conscripting drew near, everybody hinted at him.
Polikéy was a farrier, as already mentioned. How he became one nobody knew, he himself least of all. At the stud-farm, when he worked under the head-groom who got exiled, his only duties were to clean the stables, sometimes to groom the horses, and to carry water. So he could not have learned his trade there. Then he became a weaver; after that he worked in a garden, weeding the paths; then he was condemned to break bricks for some offence; then he went into service with a merchant, paying a yearly fine to his proprietress for permission to do so. So evidently he could not have had any experience as a veterinary; yet somehow during his last stay at home, his reputation as a wonderfully and even a rather supernaturally clever farrier began gradually to spread. He bled a horse once or twice; then threw one down and prodded about in its thigh, and then demanded that it should be placed in a stall, where he began cutting its frog till it bled. Though the horse struggled, and even squealed, he said this meant “letting out the sub-hoof blood”! Then he explained to a peasant that it was absolutely necessary to let the blood from both veins, “for greater lightness,” and began hammering in the blunt lancet with a mallet; then he bandaged the innkeeper’s horse under its belly with the selvedge torn from his wife’s shawl, and at last he began to sprinkle all sorts of sores with vitriol, to drench them with something out of a bottle, and sometimes to give internally whatever came into his head. And the more horses he tormented and killed, the more he was believed in, and the more of them were brought to him.
I feel that for us educated people it would hardly be proper to laugh at Polikéy. The methods he employed are the same that have influenced our