Question. What are you?
Answer. A bear.
Question. What must this bear do to be saved?
Answer. Have pups.
The pups, alas, never came to the poor “bear”, remembered as far more like a dove.
My first home was a public institution, but I had more right to it than most of those who lived there, for the Perkins Institution was founded and built by my father, Samuel Gridley Howe.
The Institution was a large brick building, with a classic façade and big white Doric columns. It stood on an elevated plateau above Broadway. Its windows looked out over Boston Harbor; you could see the Cunard steamers as they started on their trips to Europe, or returned, their red smokestacks covered with snow and icicles, after a winter passage. Strangers, noticing the blind boys and girls pacing up and down the wide piazzas that faced seaward, often spoke of the irony of fate that gave the school for the blind such a view. The rooms were large and well proportioned, with extra high ceilings. The corridors were paved with squares of gray and white marble. An imposing staircase rose, circling round and round a deep central well, to the giddy height of five tall stories; it still remains to me a triumph of architectural splendor. There was a polished mahogany handrail; to the daring, no sport was comparable to “sliding down the banisters.” This was of course strictly forbidden. It was held among us that a slip must prove fatal; one would fall down, down, and crash horribly upon that cold marble pavement at the bottom.
Till little Sam was born, I was the youngest of five children; during his short life of less than four years there were six of us: Julia, called Romana, in memory of her birthplace, Rome; Florence, named for our parents’ friend, Florence Nightingale; Henry Marion, in memory of our many times great-uncle, General Francis Marion of the Revolution; Laura, for Laura Bridgman; and little Sam, for his father. My name was given me for no better reason than that my mother fancied it. There had been a deal of discussion about the matter; when Tennyson’s Maud was published, my mother clinched it by naming me for the heroine of the poem, a fashion her friends, the William Hunts, followed by naming their first and second daughters Elaine and Enid.
The first distinct memory I have of my father is of waking one Christmas morning and finding myself lying in the big mahogany bed in his room. I knew I had gone to sleep in my black walnut crib, drawn close beside my mother’s bed in the next room. He came dancing in, with a small bundle of clothes in his arms.
“Here is a little monkey for your Christmas present,” he cried.
The little monkey was my brother Sammy, born soon after midnight, Christmas morning. Until his advent, I had always slept close to my mother. I remember now the chill of disappointment, if I ever, on waking in the dimly-lighted room, put out my hand to feel for her and found her bed empty and cold, as on some night when she had stayed out late. The desolate sense of her absence at first overwhelmed me; than came a shiver of fear of the dark corners of the room, inhabited by a strange breed of nocturnal foxes.
I did not speak till I was two years old, never so much as saying “mama”; then suddenly I pronounced a complete sentence, “See that little dog.” To help me learn to tell the time, my father contrived a large white cardboard dial with movable hands, like the face of a clock. This soon solved the mystery of hours. It must have been at about this period that some malicious governess taught me a bitter adage, which to this day I repeat, as a penitent plies the scourge on his lacerated back:
Lost, a golden hour, set with sixty diamond minutes.
No reward is offered, for it can never be recovered!