counts in his education.


This extract from one of Miss Sullivan's letters is added because
it contains interesting casual opinions stimulated by observing
the methods of others.


We visited a little school for the deaf. We were very kindly
received, and Helen enjoyed meeting the children. Two of the
teachers knew the manual alphabet, and talked to her without an
interpreter. They were astonished at her command of language. Not
a child in the school, they said, had anything like Helen's
facility of expression, and some of them had been under
instruction for two or three years. I was incredulous at first;
but after I had watched the children at work for a couple of
hours, I knew that what I had been told was true, and I wasn't
surprised. In one room some little tots were standing before the
blackboard, painfully constructing "simple sentences." A little
girl had written: "I have a new dress. It is a pretty dress. My
mamma made my pretty new dress. I love mamma." A curly-headed
little boy was writing: "I have a large ball. I like to kick my
large ball." When we entered the room, the children's attention
was riveted on Helen. One of them pulled me by the sleeve and
said, "Girl is blind." The teacher was writing on the blackboard:
"The girl's name is Helen. She is deaf. She cannot see. We are
very sorry." I said: "Why do you write those sentences on the
board? Wouldn't the children understand if you talked to them
about Helen?" The teacher said something about getting the
correct construction, and continued to construct an exercise out