Father Ragarou, another Jesuit priest of another type, reached the road-house from the opposite direction about the same time we did, and I was interested in watching his treatment of the inflamed eyes. Upon a disk of lead he folded a little piece of cotton cloth in the shape of a tent, and, setting fire to it, allowed it to burn out completely. Then with a wet camel's-hair brush he gathered up the slight yellow residuum of the combustion and painted it over the eyes, holding the lids open with thumb and finger and drawing the brush through and through. An incredulous spectator, noticing the sacred monogram neatly stamped upon the disk of lead, made some sneering remark to me about "Romish superstition," but remembering the Jesuit's bark, and recalling that I had in my writing-case at that moment a letter I had brought all the way from the Koyukuk addressed to this very priest, begging for a further supply of a pile ointment that had proved efficacious, I held my peace. Whether it be an oxide or a carbonate, or some salt that is formed by the combustion, I am not chemist enough to know, but I saw man after man relieved by this application. Even the scoffer was convinced there was merit in the treatment, though stoutly protesting that "them letters" had nothing to do with it; which nobody took the trouble to argue with him. My own custom--we are all of us doctors of a sort in this country--is to instil a few drops of a five-per-cent solution of cocaine, which gives immediate temporary relief, and then apply frequent washes of boric acid, bandaging up the eyes completely in bad cases by cloths kept wet with the solution. But I do not know that it brings better result than the lead treatment. Certainly it is a matter in which an ounce of any sort of prevention is better than a pound of any sort of cure. The affection is a serious one, being nothing more or less than acute ophthalmia; the pain is very severe, and repeated attacks are said to bring permanent weakness of the eyes. Smoked glasses or goggles,[A] veils of green or blue or black, even a crescent eye-shade cut out of a piece of birch-bark or cardboard and blackened on its under-side with charcoal, will prevent the hours and sometimes days of torture which this distemper entails. [Sidenote: HORSES AND MULES]