The Story of My Life | Page 8

find out the secret for
several years. Then I learned what those papers were, and that my
father edited one of them.
My father was most loving and indulgent, devoted to his home, seldom
leaving us, except in the hunting season. He was a great hunter, I have

been told, and a celebrated shot. Next to his family he loved his dogs
and gun. His hospitality was great, almost to a fault, and he seldom
came home without bringing a guest. His special pride was the big
garden where, it was said, he raised the finest watermelons and
strawberries in the county; and to me he brought the first ripe grapes
and the choicest berries. I remember his caressing touch as he led me
from tree to tree, from vine to vine, and his eager delight in whatever
pleased me.
He was a famous story-teller; after I had acquired language he used to
spell clumsily into my hand his cleverest anecdotes, and nothing
pleased him more than to have me repeat them at an opportune
moment.
I was in the North, enjoying the last beautiful days of the summer of
1896, when I heard the news of my father's death. He had had a short
illness, there had been a brief time of acute suffering, then all was over.
This was my first great sorrow--my first personal experience with
death.
How shall I write of my mother? She is so near to me that it almost
seems indelicate to speak of her.
For a long time I regarded my little sister as an intruder. I knew that I
had ceased to be my mother's only darling, and the thought filled me
with jealousy. She sat in my mother's lap constantly, where I used to sit,
and seemed to take up all her care and time. One day something
happened which seemed to me to be adding insult to injury.
At that time I had a much-petted, much-abused doll, which I afterward
named Nancy. She was, alas, the helpless victim of my outbursts of
temper and of affection, so that she became much the worse for wear. I
had dolls which talked, and cried, and opened and shut their eyes; yet I
never loved one of them as I loved poor Nancy. She had a cradle, and I
often spent an hour or more rocking her. I guarded both doll and cradle
with the most jealous care; but once I discovered my little sister
sleeping peacefully in the cradle. At this presumption on the part of one
to whom as yet no tie of love bound me I grew angry. I rushed upon the

cradle and over-turned it, and the baby might have been killed had my
mother not caught her as she fell. Thus it is that when we walk in the
valley of twofold solitude we know little of the tender affections that
grow out of endearing words and actions and companionship. But
afterward, when I was restored to my human heritage, Mildred and I
grew into each other's hearts, so that we were content to go
hand-in-hand wherever caprice led us, although she could not
understand my finger language, nor I her childish prattle.
Chapter III
Meanwhile the desire to express myself grew. The few signs I used
became less and less adequate, and my failures to make myself
understood were invariably followed by outbursts of passion. I felt as if
invisible hands were holding me, and I made frantic efforts to free
myself. I struggled--not that struggling helped matters, but the spirit of
resistance was strong within me; I generally broke down in tears and
physical exhaustion. If my mother happened to be near I crept into her
arms, too miserable even to remember the cause of the tempest. After
awhile the need of some means of communication became so urgent
that these outbursts occurred daily, sometimes hourly.
My parents were deeply grieved and perplexed. We lived a long way
from any school for the blind or the deaf, and it seemed unlikely that
any one would come to such an out-of-the-way place as Tuscumbia to
teach a child who was both deaf and blind. Indeed, my friends and
relatives sometimes doubted whether I could be taught. My mother's
only ray of hope came from Dickens's "American Notes." She had read
his account of Laura Bridgman, and remembered vaguely that she was
deaf and blind, yet had been educated. But she also remembered with a
hopeless pang that Dr. Howe, who had discovered the way to teach the
deaf and blind, had been dead many years. His methods had probably
died with him; and if they had not, how was a little girl in a far-off
town in Alabama to receive the benefit of them?
When I was about