My father was wealthy, and my childhood was crowned with every indulgence that wealth could purchase, or parental tenderness devise. My brother was devotedly attached to me, giving up all his leisure to my amusement--for I was looked upon as hallowed by the misfortune which excluded me from communion with the visible world--and my wishes became laws, and my happiness the paramount object of the household. Heaven, perhaps, as a kind of indemnification for depriving me of one of the wonted blessings of life, moulded me in a form which pleased the fond eyes of my relatives, and, as it was my father's pride to array me in the most graceful and becoming attire, my sightless eyes being constantly covered by a silken screen, I was a happy child. If it had not been for the epithet, _poor_, so often attached to my name, I should never have dreamed that mine was a forlorn destiny. "My _poor_ little blind girl," my father would exclaim, as he took me in his lap, after his return from his business abroad--"My _poor_ little sister," was the constant appellation given me by my affectionate brother, yet I was happy. When he led me in the garden, through the odorous flowers, I felt a kind of aching rapture at the sweetness they exhaled--their soft, velvet texture, was ecstasy to the touch, and the wind-harps that played amid the branches of the trees were like the lyres of angels to my ears. Then the songs of birds, with what thrilling sensations would I listen to these harmonists of nature, these winged minstrels of God's own choir, as they lifted their strains of living harmony in the dim corridors of the woods! They painted to me the beauty of the world, and I believed them--but I could conceive of nothing so beautiful as sound. I associated the idea of everything that was lovely with music. It was my passion, and also my peculiar talent. Every facility which art has furnished to supply the deficiencies of nature was given me, and my progress was considered astonishing by those who are not aware of the power and acuteness of touch bestowed upon the sightless. I love to linger on the days of my childhood, when sunshine flowed in upon my heart in one unclouded stream. The serpent slumbered in the bottom of the fountain--had no one gone down into its depths, its venom might have slumbered yet.