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But you can take it and put it in yourself, when you've made up your mind, if you'd rather." With which she darted her head quickly from side to side, looking about the room, and, spying a scrap of paper on a table, had the eyestone twisted in it in an instant, and pressed it into Elinor's hand.
Finally I put him on Dole's wheelbarrow, which I found by the door of the shed, and wheeled him to the nearest neighbors, the Frosts, who lived about a quarter of a mile away. Mrs. Frost had long been indignant as to the way the Doles were treating the boy; she gladly took him in and cared for him, while I hurried on with the eyestone.
Indeed, the old Squire had once employed him to settle a dispute for some superstitious lumbermen at one of his logging camps. Anxious to try anything that might relieve Halstead's suffering, the old Squire sent me to borrow the eyestone. Although I was fourteen, that was the first time I had ever heard of an eyestone; from what Mrs.
"Oh, I wish I could see! I'm losing it all!" said Elinor, plaintively and blindfold. "Why don't you try the eyestone?" said Jeannie. But Elinor shrunk, even yet, from deliberately putting that great thing in her eye, agonized already by the presence of a mote. There came a touch on her shoulder, as before. The good woman of the gray bonnet had come forward from her seat farther down the car.
Halstead cried out, but the old Squire made him keep his eye closed; then the old gentleman bandaged it, and made him lie down. But after all, I am unable to report definitely as to the efficacy of the eyestone, for shortly after five o'clock, when the stone had been in Halstead's eye a little more than an hour, Doctor Green came.
"What is it you want?" "I want to borrow his eyestone," I replied. "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.
"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.
"Wet it in your own mouth," and the eyestone was between Elinor's lips before she could refuse or be aware. Then one thumb and finger was held to take it again, while the other made a sudden pinch at the lower eyelid, and, drawing it at the outer corner before it could so much as quiver away again, the little white stone was slid safely under.
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.
Whether or not the eyestone had started the piece of wheat beard moving toward the outer corner of the eye was doubtful; but Doctor Green said, laughingly, that we could give the good old panacea the benefit of the doubt.
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