e land
of darkness and silence. The blind are not supposed to be the best of
guides. Still, though I cannot warrant not to lose you, I promise that
you shall not be led into fire or water, or fall into a deep pit. If
you will follow me patiently, you will find that "there's a sound so
fine, nothing lives 'twixt it and silence," and that there is more meant
in things than meets the eye.

My hand is to me what your hearing and sight together are to you. In
large measure we travel the same highways, read the same books, speak
the same language, yet our experiences are different. All my comings and
goings turn on the hand as on a pivot. It is the hand that binds me to
the world of men and women. The hand is my feeler with which I reach
through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity
that my fingers encounter. With the dropping of a little word from
another's hand into mine, a slight flutter of the fingers, began the
intelligence, the joy, the fullness of my life. Like Job, I feel as if
a hand had made me, fashioned me together round about and moulded my
very soul.

In all my experiences and thoughts I am conscious of a hand. Whatever
moves me, whatever thrills me, is as a hand that touches me in the dark,
and that touch is my reality. You might as well say that a sight which
makes you glad, or a blow which brings the stinging tears to your eyes,
is unreal as to say that those impressions are unreal which I have
accumulated by means of touch. The delicate tremble of a butterfly's
wings in my hand, the soft petals of violets curling in the cool folds
of their leaves or lifting sweetly out of the meadow-grass, the clear,
firm outline of face and limb, the smooth arch of a horse's neck and
the velvety touch of his nose--all these, and a thousand resultant
combinations, which take shape in my mind, constitute my world.

Ideas make the world we live in, and impressions furnish ideas. My world
is built of touch-sensations, devoid of physical colour and sound; but
without colour and sound it breathes and throbs with life. Every object
is associated in my mind with tactual qualities which, combined in
countless ways, give me a sense of power, of beauty, or of incongruity:
for with my hands I can feel the comic as well as the beautiful in the
outward appearance of things. Remember that you, dependent on your
sight, do not realize how many things are tangible. All palpable things
are mobile or rigid, solid o