oscope. Nevertheless I find on inquiry among friends and
acquaintances that there are instances of persons in which the iris
when directly in front of the observer with the light behind him, always
looks crimson, and in several of these cases the persons exhibiting
this colour, or danger signal, as it may be called, were subject to
brain trouble. It is curious to find that the crimson colour or light
has also been observed in dogs: one friend has told me of a pet King
Charles, a lively good-tempered little dog with brown eyes like any
other dog, which yet when they looked up, into yours in a room always
shone ruby-red instead of hyaline blue, or green, as is usually the
case. From other friends I heard of many other cases: one was of a
child, an infant in arms, whose eyes sometimes appeared crimson, another
of a cat with yellow eyes which shone crimson-red in certain lights.
Of human adults, I heard of two men great in the world of science, both
dead now, in whose eyes the red light had been seen just before and
during attacks of nervous breakdown. I heard also of four other persons,
not distinguished in any way, two of them sisters, who showed the red
light in the eyes: all of them suffered, from brain trouble and two of
them ended their lives in asylums for the insane.

Discussing these cases with my informants, we came to the conclusion
that the red light in the human eye is probably always a pathological
condition, a danger signal; but it is not perhaps safe to generalize
on these few instances, and I must add that all the medical men I
have spoken to on the subject shake their heads. One great man, an eye
specialist, went so far as to say that it is impossible, that the red
light in the eye was not seen by my informants but only imagined. The
ophthalmoscope, he said, will show you the crimson at the back of the
eye, but the colour is not and cannot be reflected on the surface of the
iris.

Chapter Sixteen: In Praise of the Cow

In spite of discontents I might have remained to this day by the Otter,
in the daily and hourly expectation of seeing some new and wonderful
thing in Nature in that place where a crimson-eyed carrion-crow had
been revealed to me, had not a storm of thunder and rain broken over
the country to shake me out of a growing disinclination to move. We are,
body and mind, very responsive to atmospheric changes; for every storm
in Nature there is a storm in us--a change physical and mental.