"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.