In 1890 Mrs. Lamson, who had been one of Laura Bridgman's teachers, and
who had just returned from a visit to Norway and Sweden, came to see
me, and told me of Ragnhild Kaata, a deaf and blind girl in Norway who
had actually been taught to speak. Mrs. Lamson had scarcely finished
telling me about this girl's success before I was on fire with
eagerness. I resolved that I, too, would learn to speak. I would not
rest satisfied until my teacher took me, for advice and assistance, to
Miss Sarah Fuller, principal of the Horace Mann School. This lovely,
sweet-natured lady offered to teach me herself, and we began the
twenty-sixth of March, 1890.

Miss Fuller's method was this: she passed my hand lightly over her
face, and let me feel the position of her tongue and lips when she made
a sound. I was eager to imitate every motion, and in an hour had
learned six elements of speech: M, P, A, S, T, I. Miss Fuller gave me
eleven lessons in all. I shall never forget the surprise and delight I
felt when I uttered my first connected sentence, "It is warm." True,
they were broken and stammering syllables; but they were human speech.
My soul, conscious of new strength, came out of bondage, and was
reaching through those broken symbols of speech to all knowledge and
all faith.

No deaf child who has earnestly tried to speak the words which he has
never heard--to come out of the prison of silence, where no tone of
love, on song of bird, no strain of music ever pierces the
stillness--can forget the thrill of surprise, the joy of discovery
which came over him when he uttered his first word. Only such a one
can appreciate the eagerness with which I talked to my toys, to stones,
trees, birds and dumb animals, or the delight I felt when at my call
Mildred ran to me or my dogs obeyed my commands. It is an unspeakable
boon to me to be able to speak in winged words that need no
interpretation. As I talked, happy thoughts fluttered up out of my
words that might perhaps have struggled in vain to escape my fingers.

But it must not be supposed that I could really talk in this short
time. I had learned only the elements of speech. Miss Fuller and Miss
Sullivan could understand me, but most people would not have understood
one word in a hundred. Nor is it true that, after I had learned these
elements, I did the rest of the work myself. But for Miss Sullivan's
genius, untiring perseverance and devotion, I could not have progressed
as f