ou'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, everybody said it would be a lesson to him. What kind
of a lesson? How was he going to use it? He couldn't climb chimblies no
more, and he hadn't no more backs to break."

"All de same, Mars Tom, dey IS sich a thing as learnin' by expe'ence. De
Good Book say de burnt chile shun de fire."

"Well, I ain't denying that a thing's a lesson if it's a thing that can
happen twice just the same way. There's lots of such things, and THEY
educate a person, that's what Uncle Abner always said; but there's forty
MILLION lots of the other kind--the kind that don't happen the same way
twice--and they ain't no real use, they ain't no more instructive than
the small-pox. When you've got it, it ain't no good to find out you ought
to been vaccinated, and it ain't no good to git vaccinated afterward,
because the small-pox don't come but once. But, on the other hand, Uncle
Abner said that the person that had took a bull by the tail once had
learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a
person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting
knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever
going to grow dim or doubtful. But I can tell you, Jim, Uncle Abner was
down on them peo