ed with the meadows and the delight of flowers and
shade; but except to those who remember, the sense of sight is only a
name for the incomprehensible.

Bessie did not remember, and therefore she did not know the special
hardship of blindness and that sense of irreparable loss, of "wisdom at
one entrance quite shut out," which is so heavy an affliction.

As the years wore on she was, however, to learn the privations that
resulted from her loss of sight, although the loss itself was not, and
could not be, intelligible to her.

Some day a gifted creature may tell us of the possession of an organ and
a sense revealing a dimension absolutely incomprehensible. We may come
to bewail our lower condition; but how without the organ or the sense
will it be possible to realise the nature of the loss or the advantage
of possession?

Bessie by means of fingers or ears could get at the meaning of a book.
There is a third and quicker way, she is told, but how except through
fingers and ears can she realise it? Up to a certain point she has gone
hand in hand with sisters and brothers; if not indeed in advance of
them. She reaches that point full of ardour and enthusiasm, eager to
learn, to live, to work, and suddenly the way is barred. Blindness
stands there as with a drawn sword, and she can go no farther.

The limitations of her condition touched her first on the side of
pleasure. She could join in a quadrille at Chichester, could dine at the
palace when there was a party, and "what she was to take" had been
arranged in the morning. But in London there were no balls for her, no
dining out except with a few very old friends, no possibility of
including her in the rapid whirl of London life. She had many
disappointments, and tried hard to conceal them. Only once, says a
sister, did she see a swift look of passing pain, when telling Bessie
about a ball from which in the early morning she had returned. It was
there for an instant, recognised by the loving and beloved sister, but
at once thrust away, and Bessie threw herself with more than ordinary
interest into the account of the pleasures of the evening. Another
sister tells how about this time Bessie began "to want to do impossible
things," to go out alone in London, to go alone in a cab, and if she
might not go alone, she wished to give her own orders to the cabman.

Reading and writing depended largely on the time that others could give
her. Writing was a slow and laborious pro