se incessant
demands have entirely outrun my power of answering them as fully as the
applicants might wish and perhaps expect.

I could make a very interesting volume of the letters I have received
from correspondents unknown to the world of authorship, but writing from
an instinctive impulse, which many of them say they have long felt
and resisted. One must not allow himself to be flattered into an
overestimate of his powers because he gets many letters expressing a
peculiar attraction towards his books, and a preference of them to those
with which he would not have dared to compare his own. Still, if the
homo unius libri--the man of one book--choose to select one of our own
writing as his favorite volume, it means something,--not much, perhaps;
but if one has unlocked the door to the secret entrance of one heart, it
is not unlikely that his key may fit the locks of others. What if nature
has lent him a master key? He has found the wards and slid back the
bolt of one lock; perhaps he may have learned the secret of others.
One success is an encouragement to try again. Let the writer of a truly
loving letter, such as greets one from time to time, remember that,
though he never hears a word from it, it may prove one of the best
rewards of an anxious and laborious past, and the stimulus of a still
aspiring future.

Among the letters I have recently received, none is more interesting
than the following. The story of Helen Keller, who wrote it, is told
in the well-known illustrated magazine called "The Wide Awake," in the
number for July, 1888. For the account of this little girl, now between
nine and ten years old, and other letters of her writing, I must refer
to the article I have mentioned. It is enough to say that she is deaf
and dumb and totally blind. She was seven years old when her teacher,
Miss Sullivan, under the direction of Mr. Anagnos, at the Blind Asylum
at South Boston, began her education. A child fuller of life and
happiness it would be hard to find. It seems as if her soul was flooded
with light and filled with music that had found entrance to it through
avenues closed to other mortals. It is hard to understand how she has
learned to deal with abstract ideas, and so far to supplement the blanks
left by the senses of sight and hearing that one would hardly think of
her as wanting in any human faculty. Remember Milton's pathetic picture
of himself, suffering from only one of poor little Helen's deprivations