succeeded this passionate
struggle.

Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a
tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and
anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and
sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to
happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was
without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near
the harbour was. "Light! give me light!" was the wordless cry of my
soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.

I felt approaching footsteps. I stretched out my hand as I supposed to
my mother. Some one took it, and I was caught up and held close in the
arms of her who had come to reveal all things to me, and, more than all
things else, to love me.

The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me
a doll. The little blind children at the Perkins Institution had sent
it and Laura Bridgman had dressed it; but I did not know this until
afterward. When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan
slowly spelled into my hand the word "d-o-l-l." I was at once
interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally
succeeded in making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish
pleasure and pride. Running downstairs to my mother I held up my hand
and made the letters for doll. I did not know that I was spelling a
word or even that words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in
monkey-like imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in
this uncomprehending way a great many words, among them _pin_, _hat_,
_cup_, and a few verbs like _sit_, _stand_, and _walk_. But my teacher
had been with me several weeks before I understood that everything has
a name.

One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big
rag doll into my lap also, spelled "d-o-l-l" and tried to make me
understand that "d-o-l-l" applied to both. Earlier in the day we had
had a tussle over the words "m-u-g" and "w-a-t-e-r." Miss Sullivan had
tried to impress it upon me that "m-u-g" is mug and that "w-a-t-e-r" is
_water_, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had
dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first
opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing
the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when
I felt the fragments of the broken doll at