look upon and hear them, happy though their condition
unquestionably was; and I saw that one blind girl, who (being for
the time deprived of the use of her limbs, by illness) sat close
beside me with her face towards them, wept silently the while she
listened.

It is strange to watch the faces of the blind, and see how free
they are from all concealment of what is passing in their thoughts;
observing which, a man with eyes may blush to contemplate the mask
he wears. Allowing for one shade of anxious expression which is
never absent from their countenances, and the like of which we may
readily detect in our own faces if we try to feel our way in the
dark, every idea, as it rises within them, is expressed with the
lightning's speed and nature's truth. If the company at a rout, or
drawing-room at court, could only for one time be as unconscious of
the eyes upon them as blind men and women are, what secrets would
come out, and what a worker of hypocrisy this sight, the loss of
which we so much pity, would appear to be!

The thought occurred to me as I sat down in another room, before a
girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell; and nearly so of
taste: before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and
hope, and power of goodness and affection, inclosed within her
delicate frame, and but one outward sense - the sense of touch.
There she was, before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell,
impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor
white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some
good man for help, that an Immortal soul might be awakened.

Long before I looked upon her, the help had come. Her face was