CHAPTER XI. 
SIGHT IN SAVAGES. 
In Patagonia I added something to my small stock 
of private facts concerning eyes—their appearance, 
colour, and expression—and vision, subjects which 
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 his facon, 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 
