with the little unhappy things; but of the important difficulties
they have been through, Miss Keller was fully informed, took her
share of the suffering, and put her mind to the problems. She is
logical and tolerant, most trustful of a world that has treated
her kindly.

Once when some one asked her to define "love," she replied, "Why,
bless you, that is easy; it is what everybody feels for everybody
else."

"Toleration," she said once, when she was visiting her friend
Mrs. Laurence Hutton, "is the greatest gift of the mind; it
requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance
oneself on a bicycle."

She has a large, generous sympathy and absolute fairness of
temper. So far as she is noticeably different from other people
she is less bound by convention. She has the courage of her
metaphors and lets them take her skyward when we poor
self-conscious folk would think them rather too bookish for
ordinary conversation. She always says exactly what she thinks,
without fear of the plain truth; yet no one is more tactful and
adroit than she in turning an unpleasant truth so that it will do
the least possible hurt to the feelings of others. Not all the
attention that has been paid her since she was a child has made
her take herself too seriously. Sometimes she gets started on a
very solemn preachment. Then her teacher calls her an
incorrigible little sermonizer, and she laughs at herself. Often,
however, her sober ideas are not to be laughed at, for her
earnestness carries her listeners with her. There is never the