Joy is a real light,
Joy is a blazing flame.
Darkness is frosty.
A good sleep is a white curtain.
A bad sleep is a black curtain.
In the late ’eighties the father of Helen Keller wrote to Mr. Anagnos, then director of the Perkins Institution, asking his assistance in the education of his little daughter. My brother-in-law chose Miss Annie Sullivan, herself partially blind and a graduate of the Institution, for Helen’s instructor. Miss Sullivan spent six months studying Doctor Howe’s reports before entering upon her task. Every step that Laura had taken little Helen now followed exactly. Her progress was more rapid, as that of my father’s later blind deaf-mute pupils had been. But the details of her case were very much like that of Laura Bridgman. Helen spent three years at the Perkins Institution under the charge of her special teacher, Miss Sullivan.
There I had the pleasure of seeing her a number of times in her childhood, and of talking with her in the finger language. When we spoke of a brook, she illustrated its movements by dancing. I noticed with surprise that she did not move about with the perfect freedom common to the blind children brought up at the Institution. They were accustomed to walk about alone, and to dash up and down stairs with utter fearlessness. Whether Helen later learned to go about in this way I cannot say. When she was about fifteen, we met again at the Kindergarten for the Blind, an off-shoot of the Perkins Institution founded and administered by Mr. Anagnos. In conversing with Helen I was struck with her intelligence. In these days I heard her talk with her voice as well as with her fingers.
Helen wrote me the following letter, after reading my sketch of my father’s life, published in the Wide Awake magazine.
South Boston, Mass.,
December 2, 1890.