The eye should
be bandaged with a handkerchief; and it was very desirable, he said, to
have the sufferer lie down, and if possible, go to sleep.
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.
The woman, whose sty had been cured, opened a drawer and took out the
eyestone, carefully wrapped in a piece of linen cloth. She handled it
gingerly, and as I gazed at the small gray piece of chalky secretion,
something of her own awe of it communicated itself to me. We dropped it
into the vial, to be "refreshed"; and then, buttoning it safe in the
pocket of my coat, I set off for home. Since I was now two or three
miles north of Lurvey's Mills, I took another and shorter road than that
by which I had come.
As it chanced, that road took me by the Dole farm, where little Ike
lived. I saw no one about the old, unpainted house or the long,
weathered barn, which with its sheds stood alongside the road.
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