"On the afternoon of the following Thanksgiving day, while my brothers were playing outdoors and my father and I were alone in the house, I was puttering about when I found a bottle filled with what I afterward knew must have been whisky. Being only a child, and possessed of a child's thoughtless curiosity, I took a long drink from the bottle. The effect was almost instantaneous. I grew weak and stupefied. At that moment my father, who was in an adjoining room, told me to go and put some wood on the kitchen range. I said that I felt sick and could not go, but he insisted and I obeyed. No sooner had I got the lids off the range, however, than the combined effect of the liquor and the heat overpowered me, and I fell forward upon the open fire, unconscious. "My younger brother, who came in from play and lifted me off, saved me from death. But at the hospital it was found necessary to amputate both my arms. The burns about my neck and chest were severe, but not serious, and two months later I was discharged from the hospital. A state society for the care of children had already arranged with my father to take full control of me. A fund contributed to by generous people far and near was raised for my support and education, and after spending some months in a nursery I became an inmate of the Home for Destitute Crippled Children in Chicago. "In this home I was given instruction in the common school studies, and I learned to write and sew with my feet. After four years I was transferred by the Illinois Home Society to the care of a private family in Wisconsin, where I lived for eight years, going to the public school and practically completing the high school course. During all this time I continued to learn how to make hands of my feet, and I have kept on perfecting myself in this necessary acquirement ever since. It has, of course, taken a great deal of perseverance and determination, and has required constant effort and practice, coupled with no little physical skill and suppleness. But it must be borne in mind that for nearly twenty years I have been without hands and arms, and that during most of this time I have had to wait on myself. So my feet have been in almost continual training. I have never found a task too hard to undertake nor too tedious to finish, and no one appreciates the truth of the old saying, 'Where there's a will, there's a way,' better than I do.