While my cousin Halstead was helping to tend the machine, he got a bit of wheat beard in his right eye.
First Theodora, then Addison, and finally the old Squire, tried to wipe it out of his eye with a silk handkerchief; but they could not get it out, and by the next morning Halstead was suffering so much that Addison went to summon Doctor Green from the village, six miles away.

But the doctor had gone to Portland, and Addison came back without him.
Meanwhile a neighbor, Mrs.Wilbur, suggested putting an eyestone into Halstead's eye to get out the irritating substance.

Mrs.Wilbur told them that Prudent Bedell, a queer old fellow who lived at Lurvey's Mills, four miles away, had an eyestone that he would lend to any one for ten cents.
Bedell was generally known as "the old sin-smeller," because he pretended to be able, through his sense of smell, to detect a criminal.
Indeed, the old Squire had once employed him to settle a dispute for some superstitious lumbermen at one of his logging camps.
Anxious to try anything that might relieve Halstead's suffering, the old Squire sent me to borrow the eyestone.

Although I was fourteen, that was the first time I had ever heard of an eyestone; from what Mrs.Wilbur had said about it, I supposed that it was something very mysterious.
"It will creep all round, inside the lid of his eye," she had said, "and find the dirt, and draw it along to the outer corner and push it out." Physicians and oculists still have some faith in eyestones, I believe, although, on account of the progress that has been made in methods of treating the eye, they are not as much in use as formerly.

Most eyestones are a calcareous deposit, found in the shell of the common European crawfish.