One day the mother cried, “Have you used that stuff all gone from the goose quill?” and the girl answered quietly from the doorstep where she sat, for there was this one good she had, the light hurt her no more because she could not see it, and she said, “I have used it to the end long since.” And the mother said again, “I must buy you more--why did you not say it sooner?” But the young girl shook her head, and the mother’s heart stopped to see her look, and then these words came wildly from those gentle lips, “Oh, mother, I am blind--well I know I am blind! I cannot see your face at all now, and if I went out from our own dooryard across the threshing-floor, I could not see the way to go. Do you not see I never go away from the house now, not even to the field?” And she fell to weeping, wincing and biting her lips, for it was still painful to her to weep, and she would not unless she could not help herself. The mother answered nothing. What was there to answer to her blind child?... But after a while she rose and went into the room and from the drawer where once the trinkets lay she fetched out the little gong she bought and she said to the girl, going to her, “Child, I bought this thing against the day--” She could not finish but she pressed the thing into the girl’s hand and the girl took it, feeling quickly what it was, and she held it fast and said in her plaintive way, quiet again, “Yes, I need it, mother.” When the elder son came home that evening his mother bade him cut a staff from some hard tree and smooth it to his sister’s hand, so that with her little sounding signal in one hand and in the other the staff she might move about more freely and with something less of fear, as the blind do, and so if any harm came to her, or one pushed against her carelessly or knocked her so she fell, the mother would not be blamed because she had set the sign of blindness plain upon the maid for all to see. Thereafter the young girl carried with her when she went outside the door at all these two things, her staff and her small gong, and she learned to tinkle the gong softly and clearly and she moved in a quiet sure way, a pretty maid enough, her face small and plaintive and on it that still look that blindness sets upon a face. Yet this blind maid was wonderfully clever, too, in her own way about the house. There she needed no sign or staff, and she could wash the rice and cook it, save that her mother would not let her light the fire any more, but she could sweep the room and the threshing-floor, and she could draw water from the pool, and search for eggs if the fowls laid them in some usual place, and she knew by scent and sound where the beasts were and how to set their food before them, and almost everything she could do, except to sew and work in the fields, and for labor in the fields she was not strong enough, for her suffering from babyhood had seemed to stunt her and hold back her growth.