"Advantages?" he repeated, and his tone was as helpless as his look had been. "Well, you get me, Mr. Brand, every time. You—you was born blind, sir, do I understand?"
Brand nodded. "Sixty years ago this month. When I say advantages, I don't mean I would have chose—" he made a slight, eloquent gesture toward the clear, sightless eyes. "But since so it is, one looks at it from that end, you see, and one finds—advantages. For one thing, changes don't trouble a born-blind man as they do seeing folks. I hear talk about this person looking poorly, and that one having gone gray, and lost his teeth, and like that; that don't trouble me, you see, not a mite. Folks look to me just as they sound. Now take our folks here—Lucy—I would say Mrs. Bailey—and Jacob: well, their voices tell me what they are like, see? They called Lucy handsome when she was a girl; she's just as handsome to me as she was then."
There was a wistful note in his voice, and Pippin responded instantly.
"She's a fine-appearin' lady, now!" he said heartily. "She sure is."
"I presume likely!" said Brand. "She'd have to be, being what she is. When Lucy first grew up, I made a—a picture (so to say! I never saw a picture) of her in my mind, and I see it as clear to-day as I did then."
He was silent for a time, then went on, in an altered tone: "Then there's other things, things that seeing folks don't have. Take hearing. I hear twice what most folks do, and I hear things no seeing person can hear; undertones, our music teacher called them, and overtones, too. Now, you hear a woman's dress rustle, and that's all, isn't it?"
"Ye-yes!" Pippin replied. "That is—I can tell a silk rustle from a calico, and a woolen from either."
"Well, that is more than many men can do. Women, of course; but not many men without training." The blind man leaned forward, and felt carefully of Pippin's ear. "A good ear!" he nodded approvingly. "An excellent good ear! There's many hold that the outer ear has nothing to do with hearing, but I don't know! I don't know! The Doctor told me of a king who wanted to know everything that was said in his house—palace, like!—and he built it in the shape of an ear. Long ago, Doctor said it was, and he didn't say he believed it, but I've often wondered. But you've had training, too; you've learned how to listen, which is more than some folks learn all their lives long."
"You bet I had training!"
Not a vision this time, though a dim, brutal figure lurks in the background; not a vision, but a sound!