“Know what?”
“Well, you can’t fool me,” says the driver. “You’re trying to keep back something from me, you know it mighty well. You know, I reckon, that if I had the salve on the other eye I could see a lot more things that’s valuable. Come—please put it on.”
The dervish says:
“I wasn’t keeping anything back from you. I don’t mind telling you what would happen if I put it on. You’d never see again. You’d be stone-blind the rest of your days.”
But do you know that beat wouldn’t believe him. No, he begged and begged, and whined and cried, till at last the dervish opened his box and told him to put it on, if he wanted to. So the man done it, and sure enough he was as blind as a bat in a minute.
Then the dervish laughed at him and mocked at him and made fun of him; and says:
“Good-bye—a man that’s blind hain’t got no use for jewelry.”
And he cleared out with the hundred camels, and left that man to wander around poor and miserable and friendless the rest of his days in the Desert.
Jim said he’d bet it was a lesson to him.
“Yes,” Tom says, “and like a considerable many lessons a body gets. They ain’t no account, because the thing don’t ever happen the same way again—and can’t. The time Hen Scovil fell down the chimbly and crippled his back for life, everybody said it would be a lesson to him. What kind of a lesson? How was he going to use it? He couldn’t climb chimblies no more, and he hadn’t no more backs to break.”