"Oh, miss, I had such a strange dream last night!"
"Well, Mary, what was it?"
"Why, miss, I dreamt you were dead."
"Did you, Mary? and what did you think about it?"
"The first thing I thought, miss, was, what shall I do for my tea and
sugar!"
The honesty and simplicity of this answer delighted Bessie, and she
frequently spoke of Mary's dream.
The saying of another pupil also pleased her. She taught a blind boy at
Chichester to read, and when he came for his lessons the boy used to ask
innumerable questions. One day she remarked upon this, and he frankly
exclaimed:
"Oh yes, marm, so I do, I always likes to know up to the top brick of
the chimney."
Brush-making, first introduced by Bessie and taught by Farrow, had
proved a successful and remunerative occupation for the blind.
Encouraged by this success, the making of bass brooms was now added to
the work carried on in the Euston Road. The coarse fibre used for this
purpose has to be dipped in boiling pitch, and then inserted and fixed
into holes in the wooden back of the broom. By an ingenious contrivance
of the teacher, the hand of the blind man follows a little bridge across
the boiling pitch, reaches a guide, at which he stops and dips his
bristles into the shallow pan. He then withdraws his hand along the same
bridge, kneads the pitch, and fixes the fibre in its hole. Several men
sit round a table, and are thus enabled to work without risk of a burn
at a trade which requires no skill.
The blind carpenter Farrow, who had made the fittings for the Holborn
cellar, had been from that time permanently employed in the Institution.
In 1858 he was the teacher of thirteen blind men and women who were
learning a trade. Levy had visited Norwich and Bath during the year
1858. In the latter city a Blind Home was formed for the employment of
women instructed in the Bath Blind School. This was done in consequence
of a Report of Bessie's institution which had been sent to the Committee
at Bath. The School for the Indigent Blind, St. George's Fields,
Southwark, had also opened departments for instructing and employing the
adult blind, but we have no sheaf of old letters to give the history of
this further development.
The Committee of the Association might well look back with pleasure, and
forward with hope. They well knew on whom the success of the work mainly
depended; and in spite of Bessie's objection to the introduction of her
name, the following paragraph closes the Annual Report issued in May
1858:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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