Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/80

76 in the wardrobe, or the doll on the table. Confusions occurred; 'mug' and 'milk' were associated in a common action, and only gradually was each given its own name. Sentences followed naturally and quickly. Then she was introduced to raised letters and learned the mystery of reading. Later the art of Cadmus was presented, and within less than four months from her first word-lesson she wrote a letter of thirty words, recording childishly but clearly a few simple facts.

Her desire for expression was marked from the outset. "I used to make noises," she recalls, "keeping one hand on my throat while the other felt the movements of my lips. I was pleased 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 singer's throat, or on a piano when it was being played." In 1890 the girl of ten years, though conversing fluently by the manual alphabet with those who could read these flying symbols of speech, felt that she was cut off from direct intercourse with her fellow creatures. 'How do blind girls know what to say with their mouths?' she asked her teacher. By allowing Helen to place her hands upon the throat and lips of the speaker and then inducing her to place her own vocal organs as nearly as possible in the same position she learned to make the sounds. These, with infinite patience and years of close training, were made to be readily intelligible, though naturally far from the perfect articulation that the ear produces. Deaf children are constantly taught to speak in this way; the added difficulty in this case is that the eyes can not read the lips and visually imitate the positions in articulation. For the deaf-blind this task must be delegated to the less ready guidance of the tactile sensibilities. Such an individual learns to speak orally as do the deaf, to read by touch as do the blind. The permanent peculiarity of the double deprivation is for Helen Keller her best and normal mode of receiving words—by interpreting the finger-letters of the deaf as they are made in the palm of her hand. In this way she 'listens with her hands.'

The details of her education are now rendered accessible to all. The several stages from kindergarten occupations and spelling-games to courses in philosophy at Radcliffe College are graphically set forth. The range of her present capabilities is indeed remarkable; and the writing of the autobiography not the least of them. For the slow process of writing with a pencil—which is reduced to tactual guidance by writing on paper placed against a grooved cardboard back—she has substituted the typewriter, the space relations of the keys being as accurately fixed in her motor memory as they arc in the visual memories of those that see. Neither of these forms of record can the blind themselves read. For their own use a system of pricked