Photograph from Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
HELEN KELLER
“Hearing” Caruso Sing
Are you wondering why the little girl did not talk and tell what she wanted? She could not. Just think, she was six years old and could not speak a word! All she could do was to make a few queer sounds. Perhaps, too, you wonder why she was so anxious for the towel doll to have eyes. I think it was because although she herself was blind, she liked to fancy her doll had eyes that could see the beauties of the world. To be blind and speechless seems hard indeed, but besides lacking these two great gifts, this little girl was deaf. Think of it! She could not hear, she could not see, and she could not talk.
Yet this same little girl learned to talk. She learned to read, with her fingers, books printed for the blind in raised letters. She studied the same lessons that other children had in school, and she worked so hard that she was able to go to college.
Should you not like to hear Helen Keller, for that is the name of the little girl, tell about herself?
She says: “I was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, a little town of Northern Alabama. I am told that while I was still in long dresses I showed many signs of an eager, self-asserting disposition. They say I walked the day I was a year old. My mother had just taken me out of the bath-tub and was holding me in her lap, when I was suddenly attracted by the flickering shadows of leaves that danced in the sunlight on the smooth floor. I slipped from my mother’s lap and almost ran toward 94 them. The impulse gone, I fell down, and cried for her to take me in her arms.
“These happy days did not last long, for an illness came which closed my eyes and ears and plunged me into the unconsciousness of a new born baby. The doctor thought I could not live. Early one morning, however, the fever left me, but I was never to see or hear again.”