The importa in my life was my visit to Boston, in May, 1888. As if it were yesterday I remember the preparations, the departure with my teacher and my mother, the journey, and finally the arrival in Boston.
How different this journey was from the one I had made to Baltimore two years before! I was no longer a restless, excitable little creature, requiring the attention of everybody orain to keep me amused. I sat quietly beside Miss Sullivan, taking in with eager i all that she told me about what she saw out of the car window: the beautiful Tennessee River, the great cotton-fields, the hills and woods, and the crowds of laughing negroes at the stations, who waved to the people orain and brought delicious dy and pop balls through the car. On the seat opposite me sat my big rag doll, Nancy, in a new gingham dress and a beruffled sunbo, looking at me out of two bead eyes. Sometimes, when I was not absorbed in Miss Sullivans descriptions, I remembered Nancys existend took her up in my arms, but I generally calmed my sce by making myself believe that she was asleep.
As I shall not have occasion to refer to Nancy again, I wish to tell here a sad experience she had soon after our arrival in Boston. She was covered with dirt--the remains of mud pies I had pelled her to eat, although she had never shown any special liking for them. The laundress at the Perkins Institutioly carried her off to give her a bath. This was too much for poor Nancy. When I saw her she was a formless heap of cotton, which I should not have reized at all except for the two bead eyes which looked out at me reproachfully.
Wherain at last pulled into the station at Boston it was as if a beautiful fairy tale had e true. The "once upon a time" was now; the "far-away try" was here.
We had scarcely arrived at the Perkins Institution for the Blind when I began to make friends with the little blind children. It delighted me inexpressibly to find that they khe manual alphabet. What joy to talk with other children in my own language! Until then I had been like a fner speaking through an interpreter. In the school where Laura Bridgman was taught I was in my own try. It took me some time to appreciate the fact that my new friends were blind. I knew I could not see; but it did not seem possible that all the eager, loving children who gathered round me and joined heartily in my frolics were also blind. I remember the surprise and the pain I felt as I noticed that they placed their hands over mine when I talked to them and that they read books with their fingers. Although I had been told this before, and although I uood my own deprivations, yet I had thought vaguely that sihey could hear, they must have a sort of "sed sight," and I was not prepared to find one child and another a another deprived of the same precious gift. But they were so happy and tehat I lost all sense of pain in the pleasure of their panionship.
One day spent with the blind children made me feel thhly at home in my new enviro, and I looked eagerly from one pleasant experieo another as the days flew swiftly by. I could not quite vince myself that there was much world left, for I regarded Boston as the beginning and the end of creation.
While we were in Boston we visited Bunker Hill, and there I had my first lesson in history. The story of the brave men who had fought on the spot where we stood excited me greatly. I climbed the mo, ting the steps, and w as I went higher a higher