"Well, Mary, what was it?"
"Why, miss, I dreamt you were dead."
"Did you, Mary? and what did you think about it?"
"The first thing I thought, miss, was, what shall I do for my tea and sugar!"
The honesty and simplicity of this answer delighted Bessie, and she frequently spoke of Mary's dream.
The saying of another pupil also pleased her. She taught a blind boy at Chichester to read, and when he came for his lessons the boy used to ask innumerable questions. One day she remarked upon this, and he frankly exclaimed:
"Oh yes, marm, so I do, I always likes to know up to the top brick of the chimney."
Brush-making, first introduced by Bessie and taught by Farrow, had proved a successful and remunerative occupation for the blind. Encouraged by this success, the making of bass brooms was now added to the work carried on in the Euston Road. The coarse fibre used for this purpose has to be dipped in boiling pitch, and then inserted and fixed into holes in the wooden back of the broom. By an ingenious contrivance of the teacher, the hand of the blind man follows a little bridge across the boiling pitch, reaches a guide, at which he stops and dips his bristles into the shallow pan. He then withdraws his hand along the same bridge, kneads the pitch, and fixes the fibre in its hole. Several men sit round a table, and are thus enabled to work without risk of a burn at a trade which requires no skill.
The blind carpenter Farrow, who had made the fittings for the Holborn cellar, had been from that time permanently employed in the Institution.