eement; and Farmer Dole, who was a severe,
hard-working man, began early to see to it that little Ike earned all
that came to him. The boy, who was a little over seven years old, had to
be up and dressed at five o'clock in the morning, fetch wood and water
to the kitchen, help do chores at the barn, run on errands, pull weeds
in the garden, spread the hay swathes in the field with a little fork,
and do a hundred other things, up to the full measure of his strength.

The neighbors soon began to say that little Ike was being worked too
hard. When the old Squire was one of the selectmen, he remonstrated with
Dole, and wrung a promise from him that the boy should have more hours
for sleep, warmer clothes for winter, and three playdays a year; but
Dole did not keep his promise very strictly.

The fall that little Ike was in his eighth year, the threshers, as we
called the men who journeyed from farm to farm to thresh the grain, came
to the old Squire's as usual. While my cousin Halstead was helping to
tend the machine, he got a bit of wheat beard in his right eye.

First Theodora, then Addison, and finally the old Squire, tried to wipe
it out of his eye with a silk handkerchief; but they could not get it
out, and by the next morning Halstead was suffering so much that Addison
went to summon Doctor Green from the village, six miles away. But the
doctor had gone to Portland, and Addison came back without him.
Meanwhile a neighbor, Mrs. Wilbur, suggested putting an eyestone into
Halstead's eye to get out the irritating substance. Mrs. Wilbur told
them that Prudent Bedell, a queer old fellow who lived at Lurvey's
Mills, four miles away, had an eyestone that he would lend to any one
for ten cents.

Bedell was generally known as "the old sin-smeller," because he
pretended to be able, through his sense of smell, to detect a criminal.
Indeed, the old Squire had once employed him to settle a dispute for
some superstitious lumbermen at one of his logging camps.

Anxious to try anything that might relieve Halstead's suffering, the old
Squire sent me to borrow the eyestone. Although I was fourteen, that was
the first time I had ever heard of an eyestone; from what Mrs. Wilbur
had said about it, I supposed that it was something very mysterious.

"It will creep all round, inside the lid of his eye," she had said, "and
find the dirt, and draw it along to the outer corner and push it out."

Physicians and oculists still have some fait