he dervish says, "I don't know but what you say is reasonable
enough."

So he done it, and they separated and the dervish started off again with
his forty. But pretty soon here comes the camel-driver bawling after him
again, and whines and slobbers around and begs another ten off of him,
saying thirty camel loads of treasures was enough to see a dervish
through, because they live very simple, you know, and don't keep house,
but board around and give their note.

But that warn't the end yet. That ornery hound kept coming and coming
till he had begged back all the camels and had the whole hundred. Then
he was satisfied, and ever so grateful, and said he wouldn't ever forgit
the dervish as long as he lived, and nobody hadn't been so good to him
before, and liberal. So they shook hands good-bye, and separated and
started off again.

But do you know, it warn't ten minutes till the camel-driver was
unsatisfied again--he was the lowdownest reptyle in seven counties--and
he come a-running again. And this time the thing he wanted was to get
the dervish to rub some of the salve on his other eye.

"Why?" said the dervish.

"Oh, you know," says the driver.

"Know what?"

"Well, you can't fool me," says the driver. "You're trying to keep back
something from me, you know it mighty well. You know, I reckon, that if
I had the salve on the other eye I could see a lot more things that's
valuable. Come--please put it on."

The dervish says:

"I wasn't keeping anything back from you. I don't mind telling you what
would happen if I put it on. You'd never see again. You'd be stone-blind
the rest of your days."

But do you know that beat wouldn't believe him. No, he begged and
begged, and whined and cried, till at last the dervish opened his box
and told him to put it on, if he wanted to. So the man done it, and sure
enough he was as blind as a bat in a minute.

Then the dervish laughed at him and mocked at him and made fun of him;
and says:

"Good-bye--a man that's blind hain't got no use for jewelry."

And he cleared out with the hundred camels, and left that man to wander
around poor and miserable and friendless the rest of his days in the
Desert.

Jim said he'd bet it was a lesson to him.

"Yes," Tom says, "and like a considerable many lessons a body gets.
They ain't no account, because the thing don't ever happen the same way
again--and can't. The time Hen Scovil fell down the chimbly and crippled
his back for life,