CHAPTER XL 



SIGHT IN SAVAGES. 



In Patagonia I added something to my small stock 

 of private facts concerning eyes — tlieir appearance, 

 colour, and expression — and vision, subjects wliich 

 have had a mild attraction for me as long as I can 

 remember. When, as a boy, I mixed with the 

 gauchos of the pampas, there was one among them 

 who greatly awed me by his appearance and cha- 

 racter. He was distinguished among his fellows by 

 his tallness, the thickness of his eyebrows and the 

 great length of his crow-black beard, the form and 

 length of hisfacon, or knife, which was nothing but 

 a sword worn knife-wise, and the ballads he com- 

 posed, in which were recounted, in a harsh tuneless 

 voice to the strum-strum of a guitar, the hand-to- 

 hand combats he had had with others of his class 

 — fighters and desperadoes — and in which he had 

 always been the victor, for his adversaries had all 

 been slain to a man. But his eyes, his most 

 wonderful feature, impressed me more than any- 

 thing else ; for one was black and the other dark 

 blue. All other strange and extranatural things in 

 nature, of which I had personal knowledge, as, for 

 instance, mushrooms growing in rings, and the 



