now what to do." They were proposing
to raise a fund, and he thought $50,000 enough to furnish an income of
$2400 or $2500 a year for the support of that wonderful girl and her
wonderful teacher, Miss Sullivan, now Mrs. Macy. I wrote to Mr. Hutton
and said: "Go on, get up your fund. It will be slow, but if you want
quick work, I propose this system," the system I speak of, of asking
people to contribute such and such a sum from year to year and drop
out whenever they please, and he would find there wouldn't be any
difficulty, people wouldn't feel the burden of it. And he wrote back
saying he had raised the $2400 a year indefinitely by that system in, a
single afternoon. We would like to do something just like that to-night.
We will take as many checks as you care to give. You can leave your
donations in the big room outside.

I knew once what it was to be blind. I shall never forget that
experience. I have been as blind as anybody ever was for three or
four hours, and the sufferings that I endured and the mishaps and the
accidents that are burning in my memory make my sympathy rise when I
feel for the blind and always shall feel. I once went to Heidelberg
on an excursion. I took a clergyman along with me, the Rev. Joseph
Twichell, of Hartford, who is still among the living despite that fact.
I always travel with clergymen when I can. It is better for them, it is
better for me. And any preacher who goes out with me in stormy weather
and without a lightning rod is a good one. The Reverend Twichell is one
of those people filled with patience and endurance, two good ingredients
for a man travelling with me, so we got along very well together. In
that old town they have not altered a house nor built one in 1500 years.
We went to the inn and they placed Twichell and me in a most colossal
bedroom, the largest I ever saw or heard of. It was as big as this room.

I didn't take much notice of the place. I didn't really get my bearings.
I noticed Twichell got a German bed about two feet wide, the kind in
which you've got to lie on your edge, because there isn't room to lie on
your back, and he was way down south in that big room, and I was way up
north at the other end of it, with a regular Sahara in between.

We went to bed. Twichell went to sleep, but then he had his conscience
loaded and it was easy for him to get to sleep. I couldn't get to sleep.
It was one of those torturing kinds of lovely summer nights when you
hear vari