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,
"He has no mother to bring him milk,
No wife to grind his corn."
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.