ight; the eyes were destroyed, the child was blind. Dr.
Farre, whom they also consulted, showed much sympathy with the parents
in their affliction, and they looked upon him as a friend raised up to
advise and comfort them. Many years later they appealed to him on behalf
of their blind child, and reminded him of the encouragement and help he
had given them. It was doubtless he who suggested that blindness should
be made as little as possible of a disability to the child, what other
help could he give in such a case?--that she should be trained,
educated, and treated like the other children; that she should share
their pleasures and their experience, and should not be kept apart from
the mistaken notion of shielding her from injury.

It was with these views that the parents returned to Oxford, and it was
these that they consistently carried out henceforward. There was no
invention, no educational help for the blind which they did not inquire
into and procure; but these were only used in the same way that one
child might have one kind of pencil and another child another pencil.

The sisters who were nearest her own age speak of Bessie as gay and
happy, "so like the others that it is difficult to pick her out from
them." Surviving friends who remember the Gilbert children, the
_sisterhood_, as the eight little girls came ultimately to be called,
say that the group is ineffaceably stamped upon the memory, but that
there was nothing special to attract attention to the individual members
of it. And yet the figure of the blind child does emerge, distinct and
apart, and the reminiscences of youth and childhood are numerous enough
to manifest the interest with which every part of her career was
followed in her own family.

The parents had decided that she was to be treated exactly like her
sisters. When she came into a room they were not to give her a chair;
she was to find one for herself. Dr. Gilbert specially could not endure
to have it suggested that she could not do what the others did. "Let
her try," he would say. So Bessie tried, and, ordinarily, succeeded. He
was specially anxious that she should behave like the others at table,
should be as particular in eating and drinking as they were, and should
manage the food on her plate without offence to others. He encouraged
her in ready repartee and swift intellectual insight. When the father
joined his children in their walks it was always Bessie who took his
hand. She invar