It was in the spring of 1890 that I learo speak. The impulse to utter audible sounds had always been strong within me. I used to make noises, keeping one hand on my throat while the other hahe movements of my lips. I leased with anything that made a noise and liked to feel the cat purr and the dog bark. I also liked to keep my hand on a sihroat, or on a piano when it was being played. Before I lost my sight and hearing, I was fast learning to talk, but after my illness it was found that I had ceased to speak because I could not hear. I used to sit in my mothers lap all day long and keep my hands on her face because it amused me to feel the motions of her lips; and I moved my lips, too, although I had fotten what talking was. My friends say that I laughed and cried naturally, and for awhile I made many sounds and word-elements, not because they were a means of unication, but because the need of exerg my vocal ans was imperative. There was, however, one word the meaning of which I still remembered, WATER. I pronou "wa-wa." Even this became less and less intelligible until the time when Miss Sullivan began to teach me. I stopped using it only after I had learo spell the word on my fingers.
I had known for a long time that the people about me used a method of unication different from mine; and even before I khat a deaf child could be taught to speak, I was scious of dissatisfa with the means of unication I already possessed. One who is entirely depe upon the manual alphabet has always a sense of restraint, of narrowness. This feeling began to agitate me with a vexing, forward-reag sense of a lack that should be filled. My thoughts would often rise a up like birds against the wind, and I persisted in using my lips and voice. Friends tried to disce this tendency, feari it would lead to disappoi. But I persisted, and an act soon occurred which resulted in the breaking down of this great barrier--I heard the story nhild Kaata.
In 1890 Mrs. Lamson, who had been one of Laura Bridgmans teachers, and who had just returned from a visit to Norway and Sweden, came to see me, and told me nhild Kaata, a deaf and blind girl in Norway who had actually been taught to speak. Mrs. Lamson had scarcely fielling me about this girls success before I was on fire with eagerness. I resolved that I, too, would learn to speak. I would not rest satisfied until my teacher took me, for advid assistao Miss Sarah Fuller, principal of the Horace Mann School.
This lovely, sweet-natured lady offered to teach me herself, and we begawenty-sixth of March, 1890.
Miss Fullers method was this: she passed my hand lightly over her face, a me feel the position of her tongue and lips when she made a sound. I was eager to imitate every motion and in an hour had learned six elements of speech: M, P, A, S, T, I. Miss Fuller gave me eleven lessons in all. I shall never fet the surprise and delight I felt when I uttered my first ected sentence, "It is warm." True, they were broken and stammering syllables; but they were human speech. My soul, scious of rength, came out of bondage, and was reag through those broken symbols of speech to all knowledge and all faith.
No deaf child who has early tried to speak the words which he has never heard--to e out of the prison of silence, where no tone of love, no song of bird, no strain of music ever pierces the stillness-- fet the thrill of surprise, the joy of discovery which came over him wheered his first word. Onl