There are also native “eye doctors!” These may do good sometimes by accident, though I never heard of a case, but they do an incredible amount of harm: for eye diseases, on account of the glare and the dust, the absence of proper treatment and ordinary care are very common in Afghanistan.[1] [1] The commonest affections I met with were granular lids, chronic entropion, corneitis, nyctalopia, and cataract. Finding out that I sometimes used sulphate of copper--an astringent and caustic--of which there was plenty to be had in the bazaars, they would put this powdered into any eye--say, of a child who had ulcer of the cornea! The Hindustani hospital assistants were not much wiser, for they sometimes used solutions of sulphate of zinc, a similar remedy, for the same purpose. The eye being irreparably damaged the patient is then handed on to me, and the Hindustani, like the dresser, smugly says that “If _he_ couldn’t cure the patient, neither could the Feringhi.” However, the people and the Amîr judged, I found, according to general results. I remember in Turkestan a soldier getting leave of absence, travelling down to Kabul, and bringing his old mother on a donkey the two hundred odd miles over the mountains, for me to cure her eyes. They were past all hope.[2] The painful part of the affair was that they would not believe I _could_ not, but that I _would_ not restore her eyes; and the old woman went down on her knees to implore. [2] Entropion, with nebulous and vascular cornea in an old woman of seventy. There was one old fellow, an “eye doctor,” in Kabul, whom I used to notice on my way to the hospital. He sat in a hut of rushes and mud by the roadside, with his medicines in little packets before him. I often wished he would come and have a little elementary instruction in the “eye.” But he had such a sour expression when I went by, and he never would look at me, that I did not suggest it to him.