that colour is supposed to depend on nothing but individual taste, or fancy, and association.  I believe it is something more, but I do find that we are very apt to be swayed this way and that by the colour of the eyes of the people we meet in life, according as they (the people) attract or repel us.  The eyes of the two little girls were black as polished black diamonds until looked at closely, when they appeared a beautiful deep brown on which the black pupils were seen distinctly; they were so lovely that I, predisposed to prefer dark to light, felt that this question was now definitely settled for me—­that black was best.  That irresistible charm, the flame-like spirit which raised these two so much above the others—­how could it go with anything but the darkest eyes!

But no sooner was the question thus settled definitely and for all time, to my very great satisfaction, than it was unsettled again.  I do not know how this came about; it may have been the sight of some small child’s blue eyes looking up at me, like the arch blue eyes of a kitten, full of wonder at the world and everything in it;

“Where did you get those eyes so blue?”
“Out of the sky as I came through”;

or it may have been the sight of a harebell; and perhaps it came from nothing but the “waste shining of the sky.”  At all events, there they were, remembered again, looking at me from the past, blue eyes that were beautiful and dear to me, whose blue colour was associated with every sweetness and charm in child and woman and with all that is best and highest in human souls; and I could not and had no wish to resist their appeal.

Then came a new experience of the eye that is blue—­a meeting with one who almost seemed to be less flesh than spirit.  A middle-aged lady, frail, very frail; exceedingly pale from long ill-health, prematurely white-haired, with beautiful grey eyes, gentle but wonderfully bright.  Altogether she was like a being compounded as to her grosser part of foam and mist and gossamer and thistledown, and was swayed by every breath of air, and who, should she venture abroad in rough weather, would be lifted and blown away by the gale and scattered like mist over the earth.  Yet she, so frail, so timid, was the one member of the community who had set herself to do the work of a giant—­that of championing all ill-used and suffering creatures, wild or tame, holding a protecting shield over them against the innate brutality of the people.  She had been abused and mocked and jeered at by many, while others had regarded her action with an amused smile or else with a cold indifference.  But eventually some, for very shame, had been drawn to her side, and a change in the feeling of the people had resulted; domestic animals were treated better, and it was no longer universally believed that all wild animals, especially those with wings, existed only that men might amuse themselves by killing and wounding and trapping and caging and persecuting them in various other ways.