Precisely these outward circumstances account for Helen Keller's use of English. In the early years of her education she had only good things to read; some were, indeed, trivial and not excellent in style, but not one was positively bad in manner or substance. This happy condition has obtained throughout her life. She has been nurtured on imaginative literature, and she has gathered from it into her vigorous and tenacious memory the style of great writers. "A new word opens its heart to me," she writes in a letter; and when she uses the word its heart is still open. When she was twelve years old, she was asked what book she would take on a long railroad journey. "Paradise Lost," she answered, and she read it on the train. Until the last year or two she has not been master of her style, rather has her style been master of her. It is only since she has made composition a more conscious study that she has ceased to be the victim of the phrase; the lucky victim, fortunately, of the good phrase. When in 1892, she was encouraged to write a sketch of her life for the Youth's Companion, in the hope that it would reassure her and help her to recover from the effect of "The Frost King," she produced a piece of composition which is much more remarkable and in itself more entertaining at some points than the corresponding part of her story in this book. When she came to retell the story in a fuller form, the echo was still in her mind of the phrases she had written nine years before. Yet she had not seen her sketch in the Youth's Companion since she wrote it, except two passages which Miss Sullivan read to her to remind her of things she should say in this autobiography, and to show her, when her phrasing troubled her, how much better she did as a little girl. From the early sketch I take a few passages which seem to me, without making very much allowance for difference in time, almost as good as anything she has written since: I discovered the true way to walk when I was a year old, and during the radiant summer days that followed I was never still a minute.... Then when my father came in the evening, I would run to the gate to meet him, and he would take me up in his strong arms and put back the tangled curls from my face and kiss me many times, saying, "What has my Little Woman been doing to-day?" But the brightest summer has winter behind it. In the cold, dreary month of February, when I was nineteen months old, I had a serious illness. I still have confused memories of that illness. My mother sat beside my little bed and tried to soothe my feverish moans while in her troubled heart she prayed, "Father in Heaven, spare my baby's life!" But the fever grew and flamed in my eyes, and for several days my kind physician thought I would die.