180 miles.
APPENDICES.
I.
BIOGRAPHY OF LAURA BRIDGMAN.
She was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the 21st December, 1829. She is described as having been a very spritely and pretty infant, with bright blue eyes. She was, however, so puny and feeble until she was a year and a half old, that her parents hardly hoped to rear her. She was subject to severe fits, which seemed to rack her frame almost beyond her power of endurance, and life was held by the feeblest tenure; but when a year and a half old she seemed to rally, the dangerous symptoms subsided, and at twenty months old she was perfectly well. Then her mental powers, hitherto stinted in their growth, rapidly developed themselves; and during the four months of health which she enjoyed she appears (making due allowance for a fond mother's account) to have displayed a considerable degree of intelligence. But suddenly she sickened again: her disease raged with great violence during five weeks, when her eyes and ears were inflamed, suppurated, and their contents were discharged. But, though sight and hearing were gone for ever, the poor child's sufferings were not ended. The fever raged during seven weeks: for five months she was kept in bed in a darkened room. It was a year before she could walk unsupported, and two years before she could sit up all day. It was now observed that her sense of smell was almost entirely destroyed, and consequently that her taste was much blunted.
It was not until four years of age that the poor child's bodily health seemed restored, and she was able to enter upon her apprenticeship of life and the world. But what a situation was hers! The darkness and the silence of the tomb were around her;—no mother's smile called forth her answering smile; no father's voice taught her to imitate his sounds: brothers and sisters were but forms of matter which resisted not her touch, but which differed not from the furniture of the house save in warmth and in the power of locomotion, and not even in these respects from the dog and the cat.