A Busy Year at the Old Squire's

by C. A. Stephens

"Well," the man said, "he lives just across the bridge yonder, in that little green house."

It was a veritable bandbox of a house, boarded, battened, and painted bright green; the door was a vivid yellow. In response to my knock, a short, elderly man opened the door. His hair came to his shoulders; he wore a green coat and bright yellow trousers; and his arms were so long that his large brown hands hung down almost to his knees.

It was his nose, however, that especially caught my attention, for it was tipped back almost as if the end had been cut off. I am afraid I stared at him.

"And what does this little gentleman want?" he said in a soft, silky voice that filled me with fresh wonder.

I recalled my wits sufficiently to ask whether he had an eyestone, and if he had, whether he would lend it to us. Whereupon in the same soft voice he told me that he had the day before lent his eyestone to a man who lived a mile or more from the mills.

"You can have it if you will go and get it," he said.

I paid him the usual fee of ten cents, and turned to hasten away; but he called me back. "It must be refreshed," he said.

He gave me a little glass vial half full of some liquid and told me to drop the eyestone into it when I should get it. Before using the eyestone it should be warmed in warm water, he said; then it should be put very gently under the lid at the corner of the eye. The eye should be bandaged with a handkerchief; and it was very desirable, he said, to have the sufferer lie down, and if possible, go to sleep.

With those directions in mind, I hurried away in quest of the eyestone; but at the house of the man to whom Bedell had sent me I found that the eyestone had done its work and had already been lent to another afflicted household, a mile away, where a woman had a sty in her eye. At that place I overtook it.

The woman, whose sty had been cured, opened a drawer and took out the eyestone, carefully wrapped in a piece of linen cloth. She handled it gingerly, and as I gazed at the small gray piece of chalky secretion, something of her own awe of it communicated itself to me. We dropped it into the vial, to be "refreshed"; and then, buttoning it safe in the pocket of my coat, I set off for home. Since I was now two or three miles north of Lurvey's Mills, I took another and shorter road than that by which I had come.