toy, they would race to offer it to her; and in the end they came to treat her as one of themselves, without giving a thought to her handicap.

My fear was great when I once saw her at the top of the slide. But my astonishment was greater when I saw her sit down carefully in the right place, glide merrily down to the ground, and then land with the stance of a practiced hand who had played this game for a long time.

Once I was watching her with the other little ones at school, and I remembered how, at the school for the blind, each child played by himself, and if he joined his companions in play his play was slow, as his movements generally were; for if one of them wished to give his companion a piece of candy, for example, he had first to find his companion by touch, then hunt for his hand and put the candy in it. But my child would hold out her hand with the piece of candy to her sighted companions and say, "Here, take this piece," and in this way the whole business was done quite simply. Her sighted companions were also alert, as children are, to everything around them — this one draws his companion's attention to a red flower, that one to the sparks flying behind the train — and so my child learned many things she had not known, and gained from her sighted companions a store of pictures of visible things that profited her greatly.

The teacher used to give my child a toy to amuse herself with during the lesson, but Eileen objected and asked for a book. Very often she held it upside down, yet she felt happy holding it; indeed, she asked to draw in the drawing period, and often stained her clothes with paints. I

remember the first drawing she brought home with her: from the moment she reached the door she cried, "Mommy, we made beauti-ful drawings today!" — then she opened her coat and said, "Look, Mommy, I've smeared my clothes with paint. Isn't that nice?" I answered that it was wonderful.

New words began to catch her attention more than before. She said to me one day, "They say — snow is white — what does the word 'snow' mean, and the word 'white'?" Since we could not go up to the mountain just then, I took her to the ice-seller, where she touched the ice and cried out on touching it, "Mommy, ice is very cold and rough to the touch!" But she grasped nothing of what the color white might be.

In the summer season we went to one of the beaches, where my child made new friends among the children and learned through them how to gather shells and little crabs; and after the summer ended, our beach talk together never stopped.

After she grew enamored of the twittering of birds, she began bringing me any shape she found of about the right size and asking me, "Is this a bird?" Since she could not get to know a bird at liberty, I took her to one of the boys who owned a tame bird, and she got to know it well with her hands; from that time on she began to talk about birds fluently.

We also tried to let her fully grasp the meanings of certain words whose sound she knew only superficially, like the words "high" and "heavy" and "soft" and the like. We tried to bring colors into our talk as with other children. She came to know her pink dress by the lace on its hem, or her yellow dress because it

was made of muslin. But we were quite unable to make her grasp what stars and clouds are, or what water bubbles are; we did not, however, trouble ourselves much over this question.

In this period she began asking to help me in the housework, and she succeeded in setting the table, making her bed, and drying the dishes. And so we began to feel that she was surmounting the difficulties in her way one after another; and it also became clear to us that what we had needed during our time of despair and grief was to find confidence in ourselves as her parents, and then to draw from that confidence patience with her progress, however slow it might be, and to let her overcome some of these difficulties by herself, without our stepping in to solve them.

My child will graduate from the sighted children's kindergarten before long and will enter the public school like the other pupils, except for certain subjects she will study in the schools for the blind. And when she finishes her studies, I affirm with full confidence that she will face the world with a strong heart and steady steps, just like her healthy age-mates.