ou will see a home and school for blind men, run by
a blind man. The same efficiency, knowledge of detail, intolerance of
idleness, the same generous appreciation of the work of others, that he
put into running _The Express_ and _Standard_, he now exerts at St.
Dunstan's. It has Pearson written all over it just as a mile away there
is a building covered with the name of Selfridge, and a cathedral with
the name of Christopher Wren. When I visited him in his room at St.
Dunstan's he was standing with his back to the open fire dictating to a
stenographer. He called to me cheerily, caught my hand, and showed me
where I was to sit. All the time he was looking straight at me and
firing questions:

"When did you leave Salonika? How many troops have we landed? Our
positions are very strong, aren't they?"

He told the stenographer she need not wait, and of an appointment he had
which she was not to forget. Before she reached the door he remembered
two more things she was not to forget. The telephone rang, and, still
talking, he walked briskly around a sofa, avoided a table and an
armchair, and without fumbling picked up the instrument. What he heard
was apparently very good news. He laughed delightedly, saying: "That's
fine! That's splendid!"

A secretary opened the door and tried to tell him what he had just
learned, but was cut short.

"I know," said Pearson. "So-and-so has just phoned me. It's fine, isn't
it?"

He took a small pad from his pocket, made a note on it, and laid the
memorandum beside the stenographer's machine. Then he wound his way back
to the fireplace and offered a case of cigarettes. He held them within a
few inches of my hand. Since I last had seen him he had shaved his
mustache and looked ten years younger and, as he exercises every
morning, very fit. He might have been an officer of the navy out of
uniform. I had been in the room five minutes, and only once, when he
wrote on the pad and I saw that as he wrote he did not look at the pad,
would I have guessed that he was blind.

"What we teach them here," he said, firing the words as though from a
machine-gun, "is that blindness is not an 'affliction.' We won't allow
that word. We teach them to be independent. Sisters and the mothers
spoil them! Afraid they'll bump their shins. Won't let them move about.
Always leading them. That's bad, very bad. Makes them think they're
helpless, no good, invalids for life. We teach 'em to strike out for
themselves.