ly mine, ascribe
to me a preternatural sixth sense and credit to miracles and heaven-sent
compensations all that I have won and discovered with my good right
hand. And with my left hand too; for with that I read, and it is as true
and honourable as the other. By what half-development of human power has
the left hand been neglected? When we arrive at the acme of civilization
shall we not all be ambidextrous, and in our _hand-to-hand_ contests
against difficulties shall we not be doubly triumphant? It occurs to me,
by the way, that when my teacher was training my unreclaimed spirit, her
struggle against the powers of darkness, with the stout arm of
discipline and the light of the manual alphabet, was in two senses a
hand-to-hand conflict.

No essay would be complete without quotations from Shakspere. In the
field which, in the presumption of my youth, I thought was my own he has
reaped before me. In almost every play there are passages where the hand
plays a part. Lady Macbeth's heart-broken soliloquy over her little
hand, from which all the perfumes of Arabia will not wash the stain, is
the most pitiful moment in the tragedy. Mark Antony rewards Scarus, the
bravest of his soldiers, by asking Cleopatra to give him her hand:
"Commend unto his lips thy favouring hand." In a different mood he is
enraged because Thyreus, whom he despises, has presumed to kiss the hand
of the queen, "my playfellow, the kingly seal of high hearts." When
Cleopatra is threatened with the humiliation of gracing Caesar's triumph,
she snatches a dagger, exclaiming, "I will trust my resolution and my
good hands." With the same swift instinct, Cassius trusts to his hands
when he stabs Caesar: "Speak, hands, for me!" "Let me kiss your hand,"
says the blind Gloster to Lear. "Let me wipe it first," replies the
broken old king; "it smells of mortality." How charged is this single
touch with sad meaning! How it opens our eyes to the fearful purging
Lear has undergone, to learn that royalty is no defence against
ingratitude and cruelty! Gloster's exclamation about his son, "Did I but
live to see thee in my touch, I'd say I had eyes again," is as true to a
pulse within me as the grief he feels. The ghost in "Hamlet" recites the
wrongs from which springs the tragedy:

Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand.
At once of life, of crown, of queen dispatch'd.

How that passage in "Othello" stops your breath--that passage full of
bitter do