By this time it had grown quite dusk. They were now come to a very
wild and desert place, overgrown with shaggy bushes and so silent and
solitary that nobody seemed ever to have dwelt or journeyed there. All
was waste and desolate in the gray twilight, which grew every moment
more obscure. Perseus looked about him rather disconsolately and asked
Quicksilver whether they had a great deal farther to go.

"Hist! hist!" whispered his companion. "Make no noise! This is just
the time and place to meet the Three Gray Women. Be careful that they
do not see you before you see them, for though they have but a single
eye among the three, it is as sharp-sighted as half a dozen common
eyes."

"But what must I do," asked Perseus, "when we meet them?"

Quicksilver explained to Perseus how the Three Gray Women managed with
their one eye. They were in the habit, it seems, of changing it from
one to another, as if it had been a pair of spectacles, or--which
would have suited them better--a quizzing glass. When one of the three
had kept the eye a certain time, she took it out of the socket and
passed it to one of her sisters, whose turn it might happen to be, and
who immediately clapped it into her own head and enjoyed a peep at the
visible world. Thus it will easily be understood that only one of the
Three Gray Women could see, while the other two were in utter
darkness; and, moreover, at the instant when the eye was passing from
hand to hand, none of the poor old ladies was able to see a wink. I
have heard of a great many strange things in my day, and have
witnessed not a few, but none, it seems to me, that can compare with
the oddity of these Three Gray Women all peeping through a single eye.

So thought Perseus, likewise, and was so astonished that he almost
fancied his companion was joking with him, and that there were no such
old women in the world.

"You will soon find whether I tell the truth or no," observed
Quicksilver. "Hark! hush! hist! hist! There they come now!"

Perseus looked earnestly through the dusk of the evening, and there,
sure enough, at no great distance off, he descried the Three Gray
Women. The light being so faint, he could not well make out what sort
of figures they were; only he discovered that they had long gray hair,
and as they came nearer he saw that two of them had but the empty
socket of an eye in the middle of their foreheads. But in the middle
of the third sister's forehead there was a very l