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 the can, her left swung in the air. A silver stream of water hissed into the new soil, and if Honzik happened to be near he caught it on his back or on his stupid, good-natured head, which led him to yelp desperately and seek protection with Prokop.

The whole of the morning patients kept on arriving at the consulting-room. In the waiting-room they coughed or were silent, each one thinking about his own suffering. Sometimes a terrible cry was to be heard when the doctor was pulling out the teeth of some little boy. Then Annie in a panic took shelter behind Prokop, pale, and quite beside herself, her long lashes trembling in her anxiety, waiting until the frightful affair was over, Finally the boy ran off wailing and Annie awkwardly apologized for her tender-heartedness.

It was different when there drew up before the doctor’s house a cart on the bottom of which straw had been spread and two old men carefully carried a seriously wounded man up the steps. He had a crushed hand or a broken foot, or his head had been split open by the kick of a horse. A cold sweat poured down his terribly pale forehead and he was quietly groaning with heroic self-control. A tragic silence descended upon the whole house; something serious was silently taking place in the consulting-room. The fat, jovial servant went about on the tips of her toes. Annie’s eyes were full of tears and her fingers trembled. Then the doctor would burst into the kitchen and shout for rum, wine, or water, and with redoubled gruffness cover up his acute sympathy. And the whole of the next day he would be silent, fly into cages and slam the doors.