Page:The shoemaker's apron (1920).djvu/225

 “I wish you to take this youth as an apprentice,” she said. “He’s a likely lad and will do you credit. Teach him all you know.”

The doctor accepted Josef as an apprentice and when he went out into the fields to gather herbs and simples, he took the youth with him.

Now the magic salve with which Godmother Death had anointed Josef enabled him to hear and understand the whisperings of the herbs. Each one as he picked it, whispered to him its secret properties.

“I cure a fever,” one whispered.

“And I a rash.”

“And I a boil.”

The doctor was amazed at his apprentice’s knowledge of herbs.

“You know them better than I do,” he said. “You never make a mistake. It is I should be apprentice, not you. Let us go into partnership. I will work under you and together we will make wonderful cures.”

And so, owing to his godmother’s gift, Josef became a great physician of whom it was said that there was no illness for which he could not find a remedial herb.

He lived long and happily until at last his candle burned down and Death, his kind godmother, took him.