In the summer of 1894, I attehe meeting at Chautauqua of the Ameri Association to Promote the Teag of Speech to the Deaf. There it was arrahat I should go to the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York City. I went there in October, 1894, apanied by Miss Sullivan. This school was chosen especially for the purpose of obtaining the highest advantages in vocal culture and training in lip-reading. In addition to my work in these subjects, I studied, during the two years I was in the school, arithmetic, physical geography, Frend German.
Miss Reamy, my German teacher, could use the manual alphabet, and after I had acquired a small vocabulary, we talked together in German whenever we had a ce, and in a few months I could uand almost everything she said. Before the end of the first year I read "Wilhelm Tell" with the greatest delight. Indeed, I think I made more progress in German than in any of my other studies. I found French much more difficult. I studied it with Madame Olivier, a French lady who did not know the manual alphabet, and who was obliged to give her instru orally. I could not read her lips easily; so my progress was much slower than in German. I managed, however, to read "Le Mede Malgre Lui" again. It was very amusing but I did not like it nearly so well as "Wilhelm Tell.」
My progress in lip-reading and speech was not what my teachers and I had hoped and expected it would be. It was my ambition to speak like other people, and my teachers believed that this could be aplished; but, although we worked hard and faithfully, yet we did not quite reach oal. I suppose we aimed too high, and disappoi was therefore iable. I still regarded arithmetic as a system of pitfalls. I hung about the dangerous frontier of "guess," avoiding with infirouble to myself and others the broad valley of reason.
When I was not guessing, I was jumping at clusions, and this fault, in addition to my dullness, aggravated my difficulties more than was right or necessary.
But although these disappois caused me great depression at times, I pursued my other studies with unflagging i, especially physical geography. It was a joy to learn the secrets of nature: how--in the picturesque language of the Old Testament--the winds are made to blow from the four ers of the heavens, how the vapours asd from the ends of the earth, how rivers are cut out among the rocks, and mountains overturned by the roots, and in what ways man may overany forces mightier than himself. The two years in New York were happy ones, and I look back to them with genuine pleasure.
I remember especially the walks we all took together every day iral Park, the only part of the city that was genial to me. I never lost a jot of my delight in this great park. I loved to have it described every time I e; for it was beautiful in all its aspects, and these aspects were so many that it was beautiful in a different way each day of the nine months I spent in New York.
In the spring we made excursions to various places of i. We sailed on the Hudson River and wandered about on its green banks, of which Bryant loved to sing. I liked the simple, wild grandeur of the palisades.
Among the places I visited were West Point, Tarrytown, the home of Washingt, where I walked through "Sleepy Hollow.」
The teachers at the Wright-Humason School were allanning how they might give the pupils every advahat those who hear enjoy--how they might make much of few tendenci