Pippin gave him a helpless look. His eyes wandered over the scene before him: the wide, sunny barnyard, the neat buildings, the trim garden spaces, the green, whispering trees; beyond them the white ribbon of the road, and wave upon wave of fair rolling country, sinking gradually to where the river flowed between its darkly wooded banks; overhead a sky of dazzling blue flecked with cloudlets of no less dazzling white. There was a hawk hovering over the chicken yard. Pippin picked up a stone and threw it at the bird, which vanished with a shrill scream. His eyes came back to the figure in the doorway, with bent head and flying fingers. "Advantages?" he repeated, and his tone was as helpless as his look had been. "Well, you get me, Mr. Brand, every time. You--you was born blind, sir, do I understand?" Brand nodded. "Sixty years ago this month. When I say advantages, I don't mean I would have chose--" he made a slight, eloquent gesture toward the clear, sightless eyes. "But since so it is, one looks at it from that end, you see, and one finds--advantages. For one thing, changes don't trouble a born-blind man as they do seeing folks. I hear talk about this person looking poorly, and that one having gone gray, and lost his teeth, and like that; that don't trouble me, you see, not a mite. Folks look to me just as they sound. Now take our folks here--Lucy--I would say Mrs. Bailey--and Jacob: well, their voices tell me what they are like, see? They called Lucy handsome when she was a girl; she's just as handsome to me as she was then." There was a wistful note in his voice, and Pippin responded instantly. "She's a fine-appearin' lady, now!" he said heartily. "She sure is." "I presume likely!" said Brand. "She'd have to be, being what she is. When Lucy first grew up, I made a--a picture (so to say! I never saw a picture) of her in my mind, and I see it as clear to-day as I did then." He was silent for a time, then went on, in an altered tone: "Then there's other things, things that seeing folks don't have. Take hearing. I hear twice what most folks do, and I hear things no seeing person _can_ hear; undertones, our music teacher called them, and overtones, too. Now, you hear a woman's dress rustle, and that's all, isn't it?" "Ye-yes!" Pippin replied. "That is--I can tell a silk rustle from a calico, and a woolen from either."