To help them there are nearly sixty ladies, who have
mastered the Braille system and come daily to teach it. There are many
other volunteers, who take the men on walks around Regent's Park and
who talk and read to them. Everywhere was activity. Everywhere some one
was helping some one: the blind teaching the blind; those who had been a
week at St. Dunstan's doing the honors to those just arrived. The place
spoke only of hard work, mutual help, and cheerfulness. When first you
arrived you thought you had over the others a certain advantage, but
when you saw the work the blind men were turning out, which they could
not see, and which you knew with both your eyes you never could have
turned out, you felt apologetic. There were cabinets, for instance,
measured to the twentieth of an inch, and men who were studying to be
masseurs who, only by touch, could distinguish all the bones in the
body. There was Miss Woods, a blind stenographer. I dictated a sentence
to her, and as fast as I spoke she took it down on a machine in the
Braille alphabet. It appeared in raised figures on a strip of paper like
those that carry stock quotations. Then, reading the sentence with her
fingers, she pounded it on an ordinary typewriter. Her work was
faultless.

What impressed you was the number of the workers who, over their task,
sang or whistled. None of them paid any attention to what the others
were whistling. Each acted as though he were shut off in a world of his
own. The spirits of the Tommies were unquenchable.

Thorpe Five was one of those privates who are worth more to a company
than the sergeant-major. He was a comedian. He looked like John Bunny,
and when he laughed he shook all over, and you had to laugh with him,
even though you were conscious that Thorpe Five had no eyes and
no hands. But was he conscious of that? Apparently not. Was he
down-hearted? No! Some one snatched his cigarette; and with the stumps
of his arms he promptly beat two innocent comrades over the head. When
the lady guide interfered and admitted it was she who had robbed him,
Thorpe Five roared in delight.

"I bashed 'em!" he cried. "Her took it, but I bashed the two of 'em!"

A private of the Munsters was weaving a net, and, as though he were
quite alone, singing, in a fine barytone, "Tipperary." If you want to
hear real close harmony, you must listen to Southern darkeys; and if
you want to get the sweetness and melancholy out of an Irish chant, an
Irishman