Chapter XV
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The summer and winter following the "Frost King" i I spent with my family in Alabama. I recall with delight that home-going. Everything had budded and blossomed. I was happy. "The Frost King" was fotten.When the ground was strewn with the crimson and golden leaves of autumn, and the musk-sted grapes that covered the arbour at the end of the gardeurning golden brown in the sunshine, I began to write a skety life--a year after I had written "The Frost King.”
I was still excessively scrupulous about everything I wrote. The thought that what I wrote might be absolutely my own tormented me. No one knew of these fears except my teacher. A strange sensitiveness prevented me from referring to the "Frost King"; and often when an idea flashed out in the course of versation I would spell softly to her, "I am not sure it is mine." At other times, in the midst of a paragraph I was writing, I said to myself, "Suppose it should be found that all this was written by some one long ago!" An impish fear clutched my hand, so that I could not write any more that day. And even now I sometimes feel the same uneasiness and disquietude. Miss Sullivan soled and helped me in every way she could think of; but the terrible experience I had passed through left a lasting impression on my mind, the significe of which I am only just beginning to uand. It was with the hope of rest my self-fidehat she persuaded me to write for the Youths panion a brief at of my life. I was then twelve years old. As I look bay struggle to write that little story, it seems to me that I must have had a prophetic vision of the good that would e of the uaking, or I should surely have failed.
I wrote timidly, fearfully, but resolutely, urged on by my teacher, who khat if I persevered, I should find my mental foothold again a a grip on my faculties. Up to the time of the "Frost King" episode, I had lived the unscious life of a little child; now my thoughts were turned inward, and I beheld<bdi>９９lｉb?</bdi> things invisible.
Gradually I emerged from the penumbra of that experieh a mind made clearer by trial and with a truer knowledge of life.
The chief events of the year 1893 were my trip to Washington during the inauguration of President Cleveland, and visits to Niagara and the Worlds Fair. Under such circumstances my studies were stantly interrupted and often put aside for many weeks, so that it is impossible for me to give a ected at of them.
We went to Niagara in March, 1893. It is difficult to describe my emotions when I stood on the point which s the Ameri Falls ahe air vibrate and the earth tremble.
It seems strao many people that I should be impressed by the wonders aies of Niagara. They are always asking: "What does this beauty or that music mean to you? You ot see the waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar. What do they mean to you?" In the most evident sehey meahing. I ot fat<bdi></bdi>hom or defiheir meaning any more than I fathom or define love ioodness.
During the summer of 1893, Miss Sullivan and I visited the Worlds Fair with Dr. Alexander Graham Bell. I recall with unmixed delight those days when a thousand childish fancies became beautiful realities. Every day in imagination I made a trip round the world, and I saw many wonders from the uttermost parts of the earth--marvels of iion, treasuries of industry and skill and all the activities of human life actually passed under my fiips.
I liked to visit the Midlaisa seemed like the "Arabian Nights," it was crammed so full of y and i. Here was the India of my books in the curious bazaar with its Shivas and elephant-gods; there was the land of the Pyramids trated in a model Cairo with its mosques and its long processions of camels; yonder ></samp>ere the lagoons of Venice, where we sailed every evening whey and the fountains were illuminated. I also went on board a Viking ship which lay a short distance from the little craft. I had been
on a man-of-war before, in Boston, and it ied me to see, on this Viking ship, how the seaman was once all in all--how he sailed and took storm and calm alike with undaunted heart, and gave chase to whosoever reechoed his cry, "We are of the sea!" and fought with brains and sinews, self-reliant, self-suffit, instead of being thrust into the background by unintelligent maery, as Jack is to-day. So it always is--"man only is iing to man.”
At a little distance from this ship there was a model of the Santa Maria, which I also examihe captain showed me buss and the desk with an hlass on it. This small instrument impressed me most because it made me think how weary the heroiavigator must have felt as he saw the sand dropping grain by grain while desperate men were plotting against his life.
Mr. Higinbotham, President of the Worlds Fair, kindly gave me permission to touch the exhibits, and with an eagerness as insatiable as that with which Pizarro seized the treasures of Peru, I took in the glories of the Fair with my fingers. It was a sort of tangible kaleidoscope, this white city of the West. Everything fasated me, especially the French brohey were so lifelike, I thought they were angel visions which the artist had caught and bound ihly forms.
At the Cape of Good Hope exhibit, I learned much about the processes of mining diamonds. Whe ossible, I touched the maery while it was in motion, so as to get a clearer idea how the stones were weighed, cut, and polished. I searched in the washings for a diamond and found it myself--the only true diamond, they said, that was ever found in the Uates.
Dr. Bell went everywhere with us and in his own delightful way described to me the objects of greatest i. In the electrical building we examihe telephones, autophones, phonographs, and other iions, and he made me uand how it is possible to send a message on wires that mock spad outrun time, and, like Prometheus, to draw fire from the sky. We also visited the anthropological department, and I was muterested in the relics of a Mexico, in the rude stone implements that are so often the only record of ahe simple mos of natures uered children (so I thought as I fihem) that seem bound to last while the memorials of kings and sages crumble in dust away--and in the Egyptian mummies, which I shrank from toug. From these reli<cite>９９ｌiｂ?</cite>cs I learned more about the progress of man than I have heard or read since.
All these experiences added a great maerms to my vocabulary, and ihree weeks I spent at the Fair I took a long leap from the little childs i in fairy tales and toys to the appreciation of the real and the ear in the workaday world.
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