Page:Famous Living Americans, with Portraits.djvu/299

 280 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS agination grew constantly stronger and more vivid. Notice Helen 's description of a snowy landscape : * * The trees stood motionless and white like figares in a marble frieze. There was no odour of pine needles. The rays of the sun fell upon the trees so that the twigs sparkled like diamonds and dropped in showers when we touched them.'* From language, the study passed to literature, and spread to botany and zoology, all taught in the most fascinating, informal way in the open air. In 1890 Helen Keller was told of a deaf and blind girl in Norway who had been taught to speak. Immediately she re- solved that she, too, would learn. She took eleven lessons of Miss Fuller, principal of the Horace Mann school. The method of teaching her was to allow her to feel the position of the tongue and lips of some one speaking. At her first lesson she learned six elements of speech. In the story of her life she says, **I shall never forget the surprise and delight I felt when I uttered my first connected sentence, * It is warm. ' . . No deaf child can forget the thrill of surprise, the joy of discov- ery which came over him when he uttered his first word.'* She was at first very difficult to understand, but she practiced pas- sionately night and day and was constantly drilled by Miss Sullivan. One advantage that Helen had over other children was that her attention could be absolutely centered on the task in hand — there was possible no distraction of sight or sound. The autumn after she had learned to speak, Helen Keller, now a good-sized girl of twelve years, walked among the fall- ing leaves with her teacher, who described to her the gorgeous colors of the foliage and told her of Jack Frost and his magio touch. It seems that three years before, a friend whom she visited for two or three days had read to Helen by the deaf and dumb symbols a story called The Frost Fairies. It was meaningless to her then, for that was before she understood the significance of frost or colors. The incident was not known by either her parents or her teacher — and on her re- turn home Miss Sullivan commenced reading to her Little Lord Fauntlerotfj which so absorbed her that she forgot en- tirely The Frost Fairies. Now after the descriptions of the