When she was not occupied, she wandered restlessly about the house, making strange though rarely unpleasant sounds. I have seen her rock her doll, making a continuous, monotonous sound, keeping one hand on her throat, while the fingers of the other hand noted the movements of her lips. This was in imitation of her mother's crooning to the baby. Occasionally she broke out into a merry laugh, and then she would reach out and touch the mouth of any one who happened to be near her, to see if he were laughing also. If she detected no smile, she gesticulated excitedly, trying to convey her thought; but if she failed to make her companion laugh, she sat still for a few moments, with a troubled and disappointed expression. She was pleased with anything which made a noise. She liked to feel the cat purr; and if by chance she felt a dog in the act of barking, she showed great pleasure. She always liked to stand by the piano when some one was playing and singing. She kept one hand on the singer's mouth, while the other rested on the piano, and she stood in this position as long as any one would sing to her, and afterward she would make a continuous sound which she called singing. The only words she had learned to pronounce with any degree of distinctness previous to March, 1890, were PAPA, MAMMA, BABY, SISTER. These words she had caught without instruction from the lips of friends. It will be seen that they contain three vowel and six consonant elements, and these formed the foundation for her first real lesson in speaking. At the end of the first lesson she was able to pronounce distinctly the following sounds: a, a", a^, e, i, o, c soft like s and hard like k, g hard, b, l, n, m, t, p, s, u, k, f and d. Hard consonants were, and indeed still are, very difficult for her to pronounce in connection with one another in the same word; she often suppresses the one and changes the other, and sometimes she replaces both by an analogous sound with soft aspiration. The confusion between l and r was very noticeable in her speech at first. She would repeatedly use one for the other. The great difficulty in the pronunciation of the r made it one of the last elements which she mastered. The ch, sh and soft g also gave her much trouble, and she does not yet enunciate them clearly. [The difficulties which Miss Sullivan found in 1891 are, in a measure, the difficulties which show in Miss Keller's speech today.] When she had been talking for less than a week, she met her friend, Mr. Rodocanachi, and immediately began to struggle with the pronunciation of his name; nor would she give it up until she was able to articulate the word distinctly. Her interest never diminished for a moment; and, in her eagerness to overcome the difficulties which beset her on all sides, she taxed her powers to the utmost, and learned in eleven lessons all of the separate elements of speech.