p. 406 | EYES AND NO EYES

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 9, 1880

EYES AND NO EYES.

You have all read the story in the school-readers of the two boys who went over the same route, one with his eyes open, and the other with them shut. It is old, but worth repeating, and worth remembering every day. So many things slip by us; so many things worth knowing go on right under our eyes without being noticed.

I knew a man who had very little time for reading or study, but whose mind was a perfect storehouse of information on almost every subject.

“How does it happen that you know so much more than the rest of us?” I asked him one day.

“Oh!” said he, “I never had time to lay in a regular stock of learning, so I save all the bits that come in my way, and they count up a good deal in the course of the year.”

That is just the thing—save all the bits.

“That boy,” said a gentleman, “always seems to be on the lookout for something to see.”

So he was; and while waiting in a newspaper office for a package, he learned, by using his eyes, how a mailing machine was operated. While he waited at the florist’s, he saw the man setting a box of cuttings, and learned, by the use of his eyes, what he never would have guessed, that slips rooted best in nearly pure sand.

“This is lapis lazuli,” said the jeweller to his customer; “and this is chrysoprase.” And the wide-awake errand-boy turned around from the door to take a sharp look, so that in future he knew just how those two precious stones looked.

In one day, he learned of the barber what became of the hair-clippings; of the carpenter, how to drive a nail so as not to split the wood; of the shoemaker, how the different surfaces of fancy leathers are made; of a locust, that his mouth was of no use to him in singing; from a scrap of newspaper, where sponges are obtained; and from an old Irishwoman, how to keep stove pipes from rusting. Only bits and fragments of knowledge, but all of them worth saving, and all helping to increase the stock in trade of the boy who meant to be a man.—Little Corporal.