That the lot of the blind is sad, she nevertheless admits. A meeting was held in New York a few weeks ago in the interests of the blind. The principal speakers were Joseph H. Choate and Mark Twain. From a sick bed Miss Keller had written a letter, which Mark Twain read to the assembled audience, prefacing it with the statement that it deserved a place among the classics of literature. Her picture of the sadness of being blind was as follows:
To know what the blind man needs, you who can see must imagine what it would be not to see, and you can imagine it more vividly if you remember that before your journey's end you may have to go the dark way yourself. Try to realize what blindness means to those whose joyous activity is stricken to inaction.
It is to live long, long days—and life is made up of days. It is to live immured, baffled, impotent, all God's world shut out. It is to sit helpless, defrauded, while your spirit strains and tugs at its fetters and your shoulders ache for the burden they are denied, the rightful burden of labor.
The seeing man goes about his business confident and self-dependent. He does his share of the work of the world in mine, in quarry, in factory, in counting-room, asking of others no boon save the opportunity to do a man's part and to receive the laborer's guerdon.
In an instant accident blinds him. The day is blotted out. Night envelops all the visible world. The feet which once bore him to his task with firm and confident stride stumble and halt and fear the forward step. He is forced to a new habit of idleness, which, like a canker, consumes the mind and destroys its faculties.
Memory confronts him with his lighted past. Amid the tangible ruins of his life as it promised to be he gropes his pitiful way.
Richard Watson Gilder wrote for this occasion a poem, which was printed on the programs.
"Pity the Blind!" Yes, pity those
Whom day and night enclose
In equal dark; to whom the sun's keen flame
And pitchy night-time are the same;
But pity most the blind
Who cannot see
That to be kind
Is life's felicity.
THE WEALTH OF ONE IS THE ASSET OF ALL.
The Man Who Taps the Common Treasury
for His Own Pocket Is a Judas,
Says Dr. Parkhurst.