Chapter IX
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The importa in my life was my visit to Boston, in May, 1888. As if it were yesterday I remember the preparations, the departure with my teacher and my mother, the journey, and finally the arrival in Boston.How different this journey was from the one I had made to Baltimore two years before! I was no longer a restless, excitable little creature, requiring the attention of everybody orain to keep me amused. I sat quietly beside Miss Sullivan, taking in with eager i all that she told me about what she saw out of the car window: the beautiful Tennessee River, the great cotton-fields, the hills and woods, and the crowds of laughing negroes at the stations, who waved to the people orain and brought delicious dy and pop balls through t<mark>..</mark>he car. On the seat opposite me sat my big rag doll, Nancy, in a new gingham dress and a beruffled sunbo, looking at me out of two bead eyes. Sometimes, when I was not absorbed in Miss Sullivans descriptions, I remembered Nancys existend took her up in my arms, but I generally calmed my sce by making myself believe that she was asleep.
As I shall not have occasion to refer to Nancy again, I wish<samp></samp> to tell here a sad experience she had soon after our arrival in Boston. She was covered with dirt--the remains of mud pies I had pelled her to eat, although she had never shown any special liking for them. The laundress at the Perkins Institutioly carried her off to give her a bath. This was too much for poor Nancy. When I saw her she was a formless heap of cotton, which I should not have reized at all except for the two bead eyes which looked out at me reproachfully.
Wherain at last pulled into the station at Boston it was as if a beautiful fairy tale had e true. The "once upon a time" was now; the "far-away co<dfn>.9９liｂ.</dfn>untry" was here.
We had scarcely arrived at the Perkins Institution for the Blind when I began to make friends with the little blind children. It delighted me inexpressibly to find that they khe manual alphabet. What joy to talk with other children in my own language! Until then I had been like a fner speaking through an interpreter. In the school where Laura Bridgman was taught I was in my own try. It took me some time to appreciate the fact that my new friends were blind. I knew I could not see; but it did not seem possible that all the eager, loving children who gathered round me and joined heartily in my frolics were also blind. I remember the surprise and the pain I felt as I noticed that they placed their hands over mine when I talked to them and that they read boo<bdo></bdo>ks with their fingers. Although I had been told this before, and although I uood my own deprivations, yet I had thought vaguely that sihey could hear, they must have a sort of "sed sight," and I was not prepared to find one child and another a another deprived of the same precious gift. But they were so happy and tehat I lost all sense of pain in the pleasure of their panionship.
One day spent with the blind children made me feel thhly at home in my new enviro, and I looked eagerly from one pleasant experieo another as the days flew swiftly by. I could not quite vince myself that there was much world left, for I regarded Boston as the beginning and the end of creation.
While we were in Boston we visited Bunker Hill, and there I had my first lesson in history. The story of the brave men who had fought on the spot where we stood excited me greatly. I climbed the mo, ting the steps, and w as I went higher a higher if the soldiers had climbed this great stairway and shot at the enemy on the ground below.
The day we went to Plymouth by water. This was my first trip on the o and my first voyage in a steamboat. How full of life and motion it was! But the rumble of the maery made me think it was thundering, and I began to cry, because I feared if it rained we should not be able to have our piic out of doors. I was more ied, I think, in the great ro which the Pilgrims lahan in anything else in Plymouth. I could touch it, and perhaps that made the ing of the Pilgrims and their toils and great deeds seem more real to me. I have often held in my hand a little model of the Plymouth Rock which a kileman gave me at Pilgrim Hall, and I have fis curves, the split in the tre and the embossed figures "1620," and turned over in my mind all that I knew about the wonderful story of the Pilgrims.
How my childish imagination glowed with the splendour of their enterprise! I idealized them as the bravest and most generous men that ever sought a home in a strange land. I thought they desired the freedom of their fellow men as well as their own. I was keenly surprised and disappointed years later to learn of their acts of persecution that make us tih shame, even while we glory in the ce and energy that gave us our "try Beautiful.”
Among the many friends I made in Boston were Mr. William Endicott and his daughter. Their kio me was the seed from which many pleasant memories have since grown. One day we visited their beautiful home at Beverly Farms. I remember with delight how I went through their rose-garden, how their dogs, big Leo and little curly-haired Fritz with long ears, came to meet me, and how Nimrod, the swiftest of the horses, poked his o my hands for a pat and a lump of sugar. I also remember the beach, where for the first time I played in the sand. It was hard, smooth sand, very different from the loose, sharp sand, mingled with kelp and shells, at Brewster. Mr. Endicott told me about the great ships that came sailing by from Boston, bound for Europe. I saw him many times after that, and he was always a good friend to me; indeed, I was thinking of him when I called Boston "the City of Kis.”
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