"These things don't help any, of course," said Doctor Eissen, as he laid a pair of blue eyes on a spoon and held them into the boiling water for sterilization. "But they lessen the shock to the family when the man comes home.
"Poor devils! I have treated them all. They are like a bunch of children. They are going home to-day. They have been discharged.
"Well, they are going home. Some have wives and children they will never see again—dependents they can no longer support. Some of them are luckier. They have nobody. The one who is to get these blue eyes used to be a silk-weaver in Brussa. He is optimistic enough to think that he can still weave. Maybe he can. That will depend on his fingers, I suppose. It takes often more courage to live after a battle than to live in it."
The dear government did not provide glass eyes. Doctor Eissen furnished them himself, and yet the dear government insisted that a report be made on each eye he donated. The ways of red tape are queer the world over.
"And when the blind come home the relatives weep a little and are glad that at least so much of the man has been returned to them."
In the corridor there was waiting a Turkish woman. Her son was one of those whom Doctor Eissen was just fitting with eyes. When he was through with this, he called in the woman. The young blind asker rose in the darkness that surrounded him.
Out of that darkness came presently the embrace of two arms and the sob:
"Kusum!" ("My lamb!").
For a moment the woman stared into the fabricated eyes. They were not those she had given her boy. They were glass, immobile. She closed her own eyes and then wept on the broad chest of the son. The son, glad that his walideh was near him once more, found it easy to be the stronger of the two. He kissed his mother and then caressed the hair under the cap of the yashmak.
When the doctor had been thanked, the mother led her boy off.