202 Idle Days tn Patagonia. 
extremely numerous. Spanish and negro women 
have wonderfully soft and loving eyes, while the 
cunning weasel-like eye is common everywhere, 
especially amongst Asiatics. In high-caste Orientals 
the keen, cunning look has been refined and exalted 
to an appearance of marvellous subtlety—the finest 
expression of which the black eye is capable. 
The blue eye—all blues and greys being here in- 
cluded—is par excellence, the eye of intellectual man : 
that outer warm-coloured pigment hanging like a 
cloud, as it were, over the brain absorbs its most 
spiritual emanations, so that only when it is quite 
blown away are we able to look into the soul, forget- 
ting man’s kinship with the brutes. When one is un- 
accustomed to it from always living with dark-eyed 
races, the blue eye seems like an anomaly in nature, 
if not a positive blunder ; for its power of express- 
ing the lower and commonest instincts and passions 
of our race is comparatively limited; and in cases 
where the higher faculties are undeveloped it seems 
vacant and meaningless. Add to this that the 
ethereal blue colour is associated in the mind with 
atmospheric phenomena rather than with solid 
matter, inorganic or animal. It is the hue of the 
void, expressionless sky ; of shadows on far-off hill 
and cloud; of water under certain conditions of 
the atmosphere, and of the unsubstantial summer 
haze,— 
whose margin fades 
For ever and for ever as I move. 
In organic nature we only find the hue sparsely 
