said good-bye, and each of them started off with his
fifty. But pretty soon the camel-driver come a-running
and overtook the dervish and says:
“You ain’t in society, you know, and you don’t
really need all you’ve got. Won’t you be good, and
let me have ten of your camels?”
“Well,” the 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 low-
downest 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, 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