Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/82

78 to speak French, German, Italian, to say nothing of her school experience of Latin and Greek. Her range of language, expression and comprehension is thus no mean one, confined though it be to the avenues of touch and motion.

It is interesting to trace the evidence of this 'touch-mindedness' in the imagery of her well-formed and expressive style. Her recollections of the days of her childhood, as well as her more mature experiences contain many of them. In reading them it should be recalled that they include sensations of temperature and—very important to the deaf—the impressions of jar or vibration, which present a rich variety of distinctive qualities.

"Oh, the delight with which I gathered up the fruit in my pinafore, pressed my face against the smooth cheeks of the apples, still warm from the sun, and skipped back to the house!" Of the Plymouth rock: "I could touch it, and perhaps that made the coming of the Pilgrims and their toil and great deeds seem more real to me. I have often held in my hand a little model of the Plymouth rock which a kind gentleman gave me at Pilgrim Hall, and I have fingered its curves, the split in the center and the embossed figures '1620,' and turned over in my mind all that I knew about the wonderful story of the Pilgrims." "The rumble and roar of the city smite the nerves of my face, and I feel the ceaseless tramp of an unseen multitude, and the dissonant tumult frets my spirit. The grinding of heavy wagons on hard pavements and the monotonous clangour of machinery are all the more torturing to the nerves if one's attention is not diverted by the panorama that is always present in the noisy streets to people who can see." With Mr. Jefferson as he personated for her Bob Acres writing the challenge: "I followed all his movements with my hands, and caught the drollery of his blunders and gestures in a way that would have been impossible had it all been spelled to me. Then they rose to fight the duel, and I followed the swift thrusts and parries of the swords and the waverings of poor Bob as his courage oozed out at his finger ends. Then the great actor gave his coat a hitch and his mouth a twitch, and in an instant I was in the village of Falling Water and felt Schneider's shaggy head against my knee." "The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me. The touch of some hands is an impertinence. I have met people so empty of joy that when I clasp their frosty finger tips it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm. Others there are whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart. . . . A hearty handshake or a friendly letter gives me genuine pleasure." When an organ was played for her: "I stood in the middle of the church, where the vibrations from the great organ were strongest, and I felt the mighty waves of sound beat against me, as the great billows beat against