I am told that while I was still in long dresses I showed many signs of an eager,
self-asserting disposition. Everything that I saw other people do I insisted upon
imitating. At six months I could pipe out "How d'ye", and one day I attracted
every one's attention by saying "Tea, tea, tea" quite plainly. Even after my
illness I remembered one of the words I had learned in these early months. It
was the word "water", and I continued to make some sound for that word after
all other speech was lost. I ceased making the sound "wah-wah" only when
I learned to spell the word. They tell me I walked the day I was a year old.
My mother had just taken me out of the bath-tub and was holding me in
her lap, when I was suddenly attracted by the flickering shadows of leaves that
danced in the sunlight on the smooth floor. I slipped from my mother's lap and
almost ran toward them. The impulse gone, I fell down and cried for her to take
me up in her arms. These happy days did not last long. One brief spring,
musical with the song of robin and mocking-bird, one summer rich in fruit
and roses, one autumn of gold and crimson sped by and left their gifts at
the feet of an eager, delighted child. Then, in the dreary month of February,
came the illness which closed my eyes and ears and plunged me into the
unconsciousness of a new-born baby. They called it acute congestion of the
stomach and brain. The doctor thought I could not live. Early one morning,
however, the fever left me as suddenly and mysteriously as it had come.
There was great rejoicing in the family that morning, but no one, not even
the doctor, knew that I should never see or hear again. I fancy I still have
confused recollections of that illness. I especially remember the tenderness
with which my mother tried to soothe me in my waling hours of fret and
pain, and the agony and bewilderment with which I awoke after a tossing
half sleep, and turned my eyes, so dry and hot, to the wall away from the
once-loved light, which came to me dim and yet more dim each day. But,
except for these fleeting memories, if, indeed, they be memories, it all seems
very unreal, like a nightmare. Gradually I got used to the silence and darkness
that surrounded me and forgot that it had ever been different, until she
came-my teacher-who was to set my spirit free. But during the first nineteen
months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky,
trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out.
If we have once seen, "the day is ours, and what the day has shown."