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"We understand each other, don't we, my girl?" "That's all right, uncle. I know what you mean," returned Miss Sellars, with equal handsomeness. "Bring him round again when he's feeling better," added Uncle Gutton, "and we'll have another look at him." "What you want," advised the watery-eyed young man on shaking hands with me, "is complete rest and a tombstone."
Amid silence, feeling as wretched as perhaps I have ever felt in my life before or since, I received one from the gracious Miss Sellars, wet and sounding. "Looks better for it already," commented the delighted Uncle Gutton. "He'll soon get fat on 'em." "Not too many at first," advised the watery-eyed young man. "Looks to me as if he's got a weak stomach."
The sailor addressed a slight-built man of about thirty, black-bearded and bronzed to the semblance of healthy vigor, but watery-eyed and unsteady of movement came down from the rail and shambled forward with his bucket.
The lean young lady, amid renewed applause, first thoughtfully wiping her mouth, acceded to his request. The watery-eyed young man turned it over with the air of a gourmet. "Not bad," was his verdict. "Reminds me of onions." At this there was another burst of laughter. "Now then, ain't Paul goin' to have one?" shouted Uncle Gutton, when the laughter had subsided.
That woman was Eve; that mirror-like lake was set in the midst of the Garden of Eden; I was Adam, and not this watery-eyed antediluvian calling himself by my name, who is a familiar figure in the Anthropological Society, an authority on evolution, and a blot upon civilization. I have little to say about this first existence of mine. It was full of delights.
"Oh, I guess everybody is," agreed Fanny with that joyous, bubbling, luxurious note that Grandma knew so well. "I saw Mary Hagley polishing her very knuckles off on that second-hand stove Mert bought from that watery-eyed man from Spring Road who drives through here with the lame buckskin horse and pieced-out harness. Lutie Barlow's got her fall tinting and painting all done.
He sat himself down by the altar of Saint Remy, and she knelt beside him. 'Well, my daughter? says Milo. 'I think it is well, she took him up. The Abbot Milo, a red-faced, watery-eyed old man, rheumy and weathered well, then opened his mouth and spake such wisdom as he knew. He held up his forefinger like a claw, and used it as if describing signs and wonders in the air.
Perhaps, like the writer of this story, you have stood by the long tables, and watched the people seated there; the white-haired, watery-eyed old men, whose trembling hands can scarcely hold the gold they put down with such feverish eagerness; the men of middle age, whom experience has taught to play cautiously, and stop just before the tide of success turns against them; the young men, who, with the perspiration standing thickly about their pale lips, and a strange glitter in their feverish eyes as they see hundreds swept away, still play recklessly, desperately, until all is lost, and they leave the accursed spot, hopelessly ruined, sometimes seeking forgetfulness in death, with only the silent stars looking down upon them and the restless sea moaning in their ears, lost, lost!
It was an admirable struggle, and a futile one. They sprayed their noses and throats with enough pure culture of virulent live virus to have condemned an ordinary man to a lifetime of sneezing, watery-eyed misery. They didn't develop a sniffle among them.
You would be caught sooner or later, and do you think you'll get much sympathy with the court after one of these ladies, perhaps, has told the history of to-night's work? Fifteen years would be a short sentence. Your wife is right, I think. You're not a very safe companion." Lupo looked about him bewildered. Only one of the band remained: the watery-eyed innkeeper.
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