hether it was a
black or a blue one.

The difficulty was, to get my uncle Toby to look at one at all.

'Tis surmounted. And--

I see him yonder, with his pipe pendulous in his hand, and the ashes
falling out of it, looking and looking, then rubbing his eyes, and
looking again, with twice the good nature that ever Galileo looked for
a spot in the sun.

In vain! for, by all the powers which animate the organ, Widow
Wadman's left eye shines this moment as lucid as her right; there is
neither mote, nor sand, nor dust, nor chaff, nor speck, nor particle
of opaque matter floating in it. There is nothing, my dear paternal
uncle! but one lambent delicious fire, furtively shooting out from
every part of it, in all directions into thine.

If thou lookest, Uncle Toby, in search of this mote one moment longer,
thou art undone.

An eye is, for all the world, exactly like a cannon, in this respect,
that it is not so much the eye or the cannon, in themselves, as it is
the carriage of the eye and the carriage of the cannon; by which both
the one and the other are enabled to do so much execution. I don't
think the comparison a bad one; however, as 'tis made and placed at
the head of the chapter, as much for use as ornament, all I desire in
return is, that whenever I speak of Mrs. Wadman's eyes (except once in
the next period) that you keep it in your fancy.

"I protest, madam," said my uncle Toby, "I can see nothing whatever in
your eye."

"It is not in the white," said Mrs. Wadman. My uncle Toby looked with
might and main into the pupil.

Now, of all the eyes which ever were created, from your own, madam, up
to those of Venus herself, which certainly were as venereal a pair of
eyes as ever stood in a head, there never was an eye of them all so
fitted to rob my uncle Toby of his repose as the very eye at which he
was looking; it was not, madam, a rolling eye, a romping, or a wanton
one; nor was it an eye sparkling, petulant, or imperious, of high
claims and terrifying expectations, which would have curdled at once
that milk of human nature, of which my uncle Toby was made up; but
'twas an eye full of gentle salutations and soft responses, speaking,
not like the trumpet-stop of some ill-made organ, in which many an
eye I talk to holds coarse converse, but whispering soft, like that
last low accent of an expiring saint, "How can you live comfortless,
Captain Shandy, and alone, without a bosom to lean your head on--or
trust yo