That sounds like slang, and I have quoted it lest somebody should think it original; but then there is really no more slang in it, as I apply it, than there is in Agur's prayer—the man who wanted what could be spared precisely as well as not, and who proposed to make his pantaloons without any pockets. The application changes the nature. Thus, I spread mustard upon a piece of linen and clap it upon the nape of a fellow's neck, and it is a blister. I veneer therewith a pink and white slice of Israelitish abomination, and protect it with a thin section of bread, and it is—oh, blessed transformation!—it is a sandwich! So with the topmost phrase of this chapter; a boy without any brim to his hat shouts it in the street, and it is slang; but I take it to christen an essay as full of eyes as Juno's Argus, and—presto!—it becomes a Christian name.

Perhaps there is nothing of which there is so many—if we except blades of grass and grains of sand—as eyes. From the potato that watches you perdu from its native hill, to a peacock's tail, about everything is gifted with an eye. There's the eye you put the thread through, and the eye which you catch with a hook, my girl, when you used to fasten your dress behind; and the eye of Day, and the Daisy, my poet; and the "dry eye," which we have been told once or twice that congregations were entirely out of. There's a violet in the garden-border with an eye of blue. There's a fly on the window-pane—six legs, and "eyes" enough in its head to carry any question with an overwhelming affirmative. There's "Black-eyed Susan," in the play, that makes you hum "All in the Downs the fleet was moored," and snuff salt water, and make a fool of yourself. I can recall but three things at the moment so poor as not to be blessed with at least two eyes: the needle, the Cyclops, and the man of one idea!

Homer—one of him—says Juno was ox-eyed; and though, from all accounts, Juno was rather a coarse creature, yet everybody has taken to likening his love to somebody's "nigh" ox; and there is something beautiful in the great lamp-like eyes of an amiable creature that comes meekly under the yoke and never makes complaint. Like Darwin's other monkeys, we are all imitative animals; and how many of us would ever have thought to look into a bullock's eyes at all if the blind native of seven cities had not set the example, nobody can tell; but then it is the Greek fashion to praise the women and the oxen in the same breath.

"Ladies and gentlemen, here is one of the most veracious animals that swims in the sea. He follers ships if so be somebody may be throwed overboard!"

The speaker was a rough man, with one arm and a grizzled lip. The subject of his discourse lay in a tank of water, and watched him as he talked. The thing was a sea-tiger, and resembled an exaggerated seal. Its large, round, dark head was lifted out of the water; but that head was illuminated by a pair of the most splendid eyes in the world. I can not say there was any trace of soul in them, albeit there might be a tender memory of the soles of the copper-toed shoes of the last little boy he had masticated and swallowed; but ah, those eyes!—they were large and gentle and pensive. You wouldn't have been a bit surprised had he burst out with one of Moore's melodies about

"No pearl ever lay under Oman's green water."

If the keeper was as "veracious" as he declared the tiger was, of a truth those eyes were the most mendacious couple that ever kept company. If there is no surviving relative to object, I should like to call one of them Ananias and the other Sapphira. It was a case of love at first sight. Such wistful, melting glances as that miserable beast turned upon the ladies who shook their fans at him, and the little children who "made eyes" at him in return, nobody but a captivating woman could hope to rival.

The dingy plaster wall of a smoke-house is as utterly blank as your last lottery ticket. Now fancy the dirty leather apron of some son of Vulcan hung ignobly thereon, and then fancy, as you look at it, an impossible eye breaking out all at once in an improbable place in that wall and close to the apron—an eye small, twinkling, uncertain, and you have the expression of an elephant's countenance. And yet we boys and girls have all been led up to Columbus, Hannibal, Romeo, and the rest of them, and bidden to mark the sagacious glitter of that sinister crevice. The word "sagacity" is completely ruined for all human uses. It belongs to the baggage-smashers of the brute creation; and whenever you read of some "sagacious" statesman you immediately think of an elephant. Without the intelligence of a horse or the affection of a dog, and with no beauty either of mould or motion, the beast's eye tells the story of what Cooper's Sachem calls "the hog with two tails."

The remembrance of an eye is the most tenacious of memories. You may forget the fashion of face and figure, but if

"There's a light in the window for thee,"

the expression of an eye will sometimes be all that remains to you of a dead friend. There it is that the soul comes the nearest to escaping. There it is more nearly undressed and out of doors than it can possibly be any where else without dying.

"Was Aaron Burr tall?" asked one woman of another who once saw that recreant "child of many prayers" just for one moment at Albany.

"I don't know," was the reply; "but such a glance as he gave you! I have always remembered him as the man with the living eyes." Ah, the flash of the soul's artillery has photographic powers beyond the art of the artist, and its proofs, of all the printing in the world are imperishable!

Do you remember the pretty pebbles you used to gather out of the beds of the brooks—the notes of the sweet low tune they ran by? Dripping from the water, they were red rubies and green garnets and golden opals and blue sapphires—precious stones every one; but the glory and glamour of the brooks once gone, they grew dim and dull and valueless. It is so with human eyes. You can not always be sure of their color. A pale, light eye may deepen and darken, when the soul is stirred behind it, till you declare it black as midnight; and a brown eye may be fairly bleached blue in the light and fire of passion. The elder Booth's eyes were all colors in a night; and Charlotte Cushman's, as Meg Merrilies, kindled into a broad white blaze, like a pine-knot fire. A nose brought to an edge, and a couple of small black eyes, form, as astrologers say, "an inauspicious conjunction." Such eyes are apt to snap, a dreadful hemlock quality, to which a strabismus, so violent that the vicious members seem trying to get at each other under the bridge of the nose, is a blessing and a beauty. Let us not be censorious. Let us wish the owners of all such eyes a great deal of self-control, or a little of the grace of God.

But whatever you do, I pray you never call anybody's eyes "orbs," unless you are re-writing Milton's Paradise Lost. And don't call them "organs." There was a country printer and editor whose wristbands would have been always in mourning with his hands, if he had worn a shirt, and who always had a stale copy of his paper sticking out of a side-pocket, and smelling musty—for he used poor ink and poor ideas to match—and he was forever talking of his "organ," wherever he was, and quoting from his "organ," until people laughed about it, and said "there was a complete outfit for some itinerant Italian with musical proclivities. There was an 'organ,' and there was a monkey, and nothing lacking but the man to grind it, and a piece of green baize!" If you wish to know about a word, set the children to using it. Fancy little Johnny's cry of "Oh, I've got something in my organs!" or a sound of lamentation in Ramah—leastwise in the door-yard—with Jenny's wail that her sun-bonnet keeps tumbling over her orbs! When children and grown folks talk alike, and the boy speaks as if he were crazy, you may be sure the man talks as if he were a fool.

I had a friend. He was murdered in Illinois. The man that killed him was never so true to anybody as was this friend to me and mine. He was buried without song or sermon. He has gone to a good place, if he has gone anywhere. I am not certain, but I hope so, for there was too much genuine nobility about him to perish utterly away—to be snuffed out like a candle, as if he had never been. His name was—Pedro. His eyes, dark in the shadow, russet in the sun, talked English all the while. Wronged by word or blow, they pleaded for him with a touching pathos. Caressed, they laughed and sparkled like living fountains. Stretched upon the threshold in the genial sun, a large human content worth praying for shone in his eyes. There was a great deal too much meaning in them for a creature whose "spirit goeth downward," and almost enough for a being with a soul to be saved. What gave those eyes their eloquence? Did the mere machinery of a dog's life light them up so wonderfully, wistfully, sorrowfully? There were love in them, and hope and abiding trust and an honest heart. What lacked he to entitle him to two names like a Christian, instead of one? He knew plenty of people with whom he never could have exchanged qualities without getting the worst of the bargain. But he did better than to be a contemptible man, for he was a noble dog. His eyes look inquiringly, wistfully, after me through the shadows of the years that are past. They are the immortal part of him. They will last out a human memory. Hereaway! Pedro! Hereaway!

The kernel of the proverb, "Love me, love my dog," is that you are getting pretty near a man when you have made friends with his dog. Now, I hate "black and tans," the tantivying creatures, their mouths full of needles, a bark as sharp as a razor, and the whole case of instruments on all sides of you at once; but I insist that I love dogs. "Black and tans" are not dogs; they are cutlery.

And now, to come right home and make a personal matter of it, this gossip would never have seen the light had I not suffered the temporary loss of one eye, and that set me thinking. Our "body servants," the most of them, came into the world as Noah's caravan went into the ark—in pairs. Two hands, two feet, two ears, two eyes; and they are matched spans, every one. The truth is, I never thought much about having any eyes at all until one of them went under a cloud. None of us do. A man never feels his ears, no matter how long they are, while they work well, unless he lays hold of them with his hands. With some men, though, their ears are their "best hold." So with the eyes. When the sight is keen and clear, we just take in day and its glories, and the charm of color, and the witchery of shadow, we hardly know how. We feel them no more than we do the window-panes through which come the sunset and the starlight. But let something go wrong, and you are brought to a lively sense of possession in a twinkling. You begin to discover how rich you were without knowing it, and what an incalculable blessing you would lose if only one eye should be extinguished. I breathed air one night, a while ago, that eight hundred friendly people had just breathed for me; and I stood with my left shoulder to an open window with a chill breeze through it, and my left eye fell to weeping for the folly of the thing; and then impalpable crows began to build a nest of most palpable sticks, and fairly filled the unfortunate eyrie until it ceased to be a window, and became a—rookery! And the eye was closed until the unseemly birds could be persuaded to build elsewhere.

I think, if you touch a man's eye roughly, you come within one of touching his soul; and I came to think at times that the crows were foraging in my perceptive faculties for material wherewith to put my eye out.

The first thing done was to pickle the offending member in strong brine, as if it were an onion; but the miserable business of corvine nidification went on. Had you thrust both those hard words into my eye together, it couldn't have hurt me a bit worse than the crows did.

Having made pickles, it was thought best to put up a sardine or two. Flax seed was expressed and impressed in an oleaginous bag, whose slippery contents wriggled about on the tremulous lid like a packet of angle-worms. But the crows liked linseed and kept on. Things looked serious, as far as I could see them with a solitary eye; but there was a comfort: if I had half as many eyes, I had twice as many friends, and they were tender-hearted women. I was a sort of Mungo Park, in a small way, only I had a wife to look into my eye whenever I asked her, which was every few minutes; and I wasn't in Africa, and I didn't lie under a tree, and my female friends were not negroes, and they didn't sing,

With these exceptions I was precisely like Mungo Park. The ladies were solicitous and helpful. One suggested bread and milk; it was brought and set upon the top of the stove. Another, an alum curd; it was made and set under the stove. A third, Thompson's Eye-water; it was brought and thrown into the stove. A fourth, Pettit's Eye-salve; it appeared and was set upon the table.

Sandwiches were pronounced good; and hand-breadths of mustard, tawnier than the river Tiber, were spread behind my ears, and a careless crow dropped a stick or two. It was getting too warm for them, but I could not see why. In fact, I couldn't see much of anything. It grew warm; it waxed hot. The skin rolled up like tattered bits of parchment, and the sandwich lunch was over.

It was time to call the Doctor. He came. Shrewd, skillful, patient, he mastered the situation. He saw the dishes of sea-water standing about, and the bags of linseed, and the plasters of mustard, and the alum curds, and the lotions, and the unguents, and he fell upon my eye, and he opened it as a Baltimore boy opens an oyster. He got no help from me; but he saw the crows. Looking about, he took a rapid inventory of what there was in the room that had not already been put into my eye. He gazed inquiringly at the bureau and a large rocking-chair. The sheet of zinc on which the stove stood arrested his attention. "You haven't used that, have you?" "No," said I; and he whipped out a little bottle, said "Zinc," shook it, pried open my eye with an earnestness that would not be denied, and poured the zinc square into it. Did you ever lie on your back in the bottom of a shot-tower when they were raining lead? If you never did, you don't want to. And then the Doctor rolled my unfortunate optic about like a billiard ball, until the liquid was swashed over the whole surface. I thought then, and I still think, he meant to burn up the crows' nest, possibly the crows. That eye was better; the birds dropped a few more sticks; but they hung about the old place still.

It was then thought best to give the cellar the usual spring cleaning, and feed the pig with the product. Rotten apples were recommended; and a Russet, that needed to be sent to the cooper's, leaned lazily over to one side on a little plate, ready for use.

A kind lady from Massachusetts, for whose interest I shall always be grateful, said that hen and chickens were good—hen and chickens smothered in cream. That puzzled me. It was too late for hens and too early for chickens. But the lady set a dozen pairs of little nimble feet flying about the neighborhood for the poultry; and one day she came, bringing a handful of small, green plants, chuckle-headed and cunning, and the secret of the fowls was out. They were "house-leeks." The brood was put in a tumbler and placed upon the bureau.

But the mischief went on in the aviary. I think one of the crows was setting, ready to lay or hatch, or something, while the other was building a door-yard fence. It was the ninth day, when even puppies pass the limit of total eclipse, and something must be done. Another lady, also from the Bay State, proposed, as the cooking and baking had been done, and the pig comforted, that we should feed the—sheep! She named carrots. The girls down stairs were set to washing carrots, and the procession of the golden vegetable began to move. First, a boy with a carrot in his claw, like Jupiter's eagle with a thunderbolt in his talon. Then a lady with a carrot on a tea-plate. Then a man with an immense fellow on a platter. Then more carrots. Last, a grater, and the business began. My patient, anxious wife sat up all night grating carrots. It sounded, in the middle watches, like the rasp of a distant saw-mill. Everything was the color of Ophir. For twenty-four hours, once in eighteen minutes, did she apply that carrot; and the crows began to grow uneasy. Their nest began to tumble to pieces. The repeated and tremendous assaults proved too much for them. The eye that had looked like an angry moon in a watery sky began to clear up, and recover its blue-white porcelain look once more.

The bandage was whipped off; but the team didn't pull even. My right eye had gone ahead in the business of seeing, and straightened the traces till they twanged like fiddle-strings. The left eye was drooping and languid. Things had a cloudy look. I saw two doctors, when only one had come in. I had two wives, with a face apiece, growing on a single stem, like a couple of cherries. My Massachusetts friends came in with their doubles. But the worst of it was, I had four feet, like a quadruped. Think of the expense! Imagine the boots! It was a worry. But I began this article. The crows are taking flight—to return, I trust, in the only English Poe's raven ever knew—"nevermore."

I am indebted to the Doctor and I always mean to be. There can be no doubt that he made those crows uneasy. The zinc was worse than the crows, and they could not abide peacefully in one place. He has gone into the eye-business altogether, for he is a Surgeon in the Navy. He is going to sea.

The brightest May sun breaks out of the cloud. It kindles the hills; it touches up the woods, just ready to bud. A robin sings that same old song by the window.

Thank God for Light. His resplendent creation—Light, that came into being the moment He called it, like an instant and ready angel, watching at His feet.

Thank God for eyes—the most delicate and exquisite of all our servants. Let us be Persians, and worship the Sun. Let us be Israelites, and pray with our faces toward the East.