Page:The Gesture No 13 1911.djvu/5

 letter of the alphabet. There were never more than six dots, but she found that every sign she could give on her ﬁngers had a corresponding signal in dots.

What it was for little Alice could not understand. But it was interesting; and it struck her as a new game, which she entered into with all the zest the young mind feels for a new thing. So, when they gave her a whole sheet of this material, she would amuse herself by picking out the signs in dots and rendering them on her teacher's fingers. So she learned that there was a dot alphabet, even as there was one of the fingers. She worked hard and acquired it; and then, to her boundless delight, found that the smooth material could talk to her! It told her wonderful tales, of how the cat and the doll slept together, and that the cat and the dog were not very bosom friend.



Little Alice has been less than three years at Darlington, but she has made good progress with both the finger and the Braille alphabet. And on those lotted pages she reads stories of children like herself, of the wonders of the world, of life and death. But it is always slow work, spelling out the words letter by letter stumbling over words that represent things she does not understand, not having felt them yet.

She is still in the halls of silence, surrounded by impenetrable darkness. But the world is no longer void and without form. The blackness is filled with other people like herself. Whenever she reaches out a hand she finds a companion to whom she can make signs that are understood and replied to. She has left the horrible-island of loneliness, surrounded by the ocean of emptiness, and arrived in a g great and wonderful treasure house of things that are absorbingly interesting, and which she is anxious to find out all about.

To feel fresh things and learn what they are called in that wonderful finger language, and to read about them in those still more wonderful raised dots on the Braille page, is delightful. Around her are other children like herself, with whom she plays. Her favourite game is to put other children into a make-believe bed and smooth them down for the night.

When the lessons are over she sits out in the Warm Sunshine (the blind seem to love the sunshine as though their pores absorbed the light from it) and nurses her doll, or threads her beads, or reads stories in the dotted pages of fairies, little boys and girls, of seas, ships, great cities, kings and queens.

Last time I saw little Alice was as in the photograph. The girl