Chapter VI
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I had now the key to all language, and I was eager to learn to use it. Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others lips they cat the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advaep by step until we have traversed the vast dista<s></s>ween our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.At first, when my teacher told me about a hing I asked very few questions. My ideas were vague, and my vocabulary was ie; but as my knowledge of things grew, and I learned more and more words, my field of inquiry broadened, and I would return again and again to the same subject, eager for further information. Sometimes a new word revived an image that some earlier experience had engraved on my brain.
I remember the m that I first asked the meaning of the word, "love." This was before I knew many words. I had found a few early violets in the garden and brought them to my teacher. She tried to kiss me: but at that time I did not like to have any one kiss me except my mother. Miss Sullivan put her arm gently round me and spelled into my hand, "I love Helen.”
"What is love?" I asked.
She drew me closer to her and said, "It is here," pointing to my heart, whose beats I was scious of for the first time. Her words puzzled me very much because I did not then uand anything unless I to<cite></cite>uched it.
I smelt the violets in her hand and asked, half in words, half in signs, a question which meant, "Is love the sweetness of flowers?”
"No," said my teacher.
Again I thought. The warm sun was shining on us.
"Is this not lo<mark></mark>ve?" I asked, pointing in the dire from which the heat came. "Is this not love?”
It seemed to me that there could be nothing more beautiful than the sun, whose warmth makes all things grow.
But Miss Sullivan shook her head, and I was greatly puzzled and disappointed. I thought it strahat my teacher could not show me love.
A day or two afterward I was stringing beads of different sizes in symmetrical groups--twe beads, three small ones, and so on. I had made many mistakes, and Miss Sullivan had poihem out again and again with geience. Finally I noticed a very obvious error in the sequend for an instant I trated my attention on the lesson and tried to think how I should have arrahe beads. Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis, "Think.”
In a flash I khat the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first scious perception of an abstract idea.
For a long time I was still--I was not thinking of the beads in my lap, but trying to find a meaning for "love" in the light of this new idea. The sun had been under a cloud all day, and there had been brief showers; but suddenly the sun broke forth in all its southern splendour.
Again I asked my teacher, "Is this not love?”
"Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky before the sun came out," she replied. Then in simpler words than these, which at that time I could not have uood, she explained: "You ot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You ot touch love either; but you feel the sweethat it pours into everything. Without love you would not be happy or want to play.”
The beautiful truth burst upon my mind--I felt that there were invisible liretched between my spirit and the spirits of others.
From the beginning of my eduiss Sullivan made it a practice to speak to me as she would speak to any hearing child; the only difference was that she spelled the sentences into my hand instead of speaking them. If I did not know the words and idioms necessary to express my thoughts she supplied them, even suggesting versation when I was uo keep up my end of the dialogue.
This process was tinued for several years; for the deaf child does not learn in a month, or even in two or three years, the numberless idioms and expressions used in the simplest daily intercourse. The little hearing <cite>?９９ｌib?</cite>child learns these from staition and imitation. The versation he hears in his home stimulates his mind and suggests topid calls forth the spontaneous expression of his own thoughts. This natural exge of ideas is deo the deaf child. My teacher, realizing this, determio supply the kinds of stimulus I lacked. This she did by repeating to me as far as possible, verbatim, what she heard, and by showing me how I could take part in the versation. But it was a long time before I veo take the initiative, and still longer before I could find something appropriate to say at the right time.
The deaf and the blind find it very difficult to acquire the amenities of versation. How much more this difficulty must be augmented in the case of those who are both deaf and blind! They ot distinguish the tone of the voice or, without assistance, go up and down the gamut of tohat give significe to words; nor they watch the expression of the speakers face, and a look is often the very soul of what one says.
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