ry attribute of Nature has a voice; the beautiful, the grand, the
sublime, have each a language, and to me, whose heart is in tune, every
sound has a peculiar significance. Sounds fill the soul, while light fills
the eye only. 'In the varied strains of warbling melody,' as it winds in
its graceful meanderings to the deep recesses of his soul, or of the rich
and boundless harmony, as it swells and rolls its pompous tide around him,
he finds a solace and a compensation for the absent joys of sight."

And so I close with a blessing upon the members of my class, and may the
God of light and love illumine their paths, and glorify their lives, is my
earnest, heartfelt prayer.

CHAPTER XXIV.

"The prayer of Ajax was for light;
Through all that dark and desperate fight,
The blackness of that noonday night,
He asked but the return of sight,
To see his foeman's face.

"Let our unceasing, earnest prayer
Be, too, for light--for strength to bear
Our portion of the weight of care,
That crushes into dumb despair
One half the human race."

From Baltimore I went to Westminster, Maryland, to visit my cousin,
Charles Henniman, and my stay there was characterized by all the joy of
sweet reunion and eager acceptance of hospitalities so lavishly bestowed.
It was with mingled emotions of pleasure and pain I greeted my old friend,
Carrie Fringer. In person she was of a peculiar type of beauty, a face
regular in features as a Madonna, beaming with the soft, love-light of
rare, sweet eyes, in whose depths were imprisoned not only an intense
brightness, but the still deeper glow of a soul of love and truth. Curls
of soft brown hair fell upon her symmetrical shoulders and softened the
face they framed into an almost spiritual sweetness. From an affliction in
her childhood she had almost ever since been unable to walk, and indeed
none of the beautiful limbs were available for voluntary motion. Thus
deprived of more than half of life's joy, its sweet activity, many would
have lapsed into a morbid, nervous condition, over which we might justly
have thrown the mantle of charity, but this dear friend was so lovely and
chastened in her affliction, that she seemed almost a Deity in her
attributes of tender love and patient self-abnegation, united to a heroic
endurance of pain with which she was daily, hourly and momently tortured.
Surely

"The good are better made by ill,
As odors crushed