The Story of My Life: With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert MacyKeller, Helen
General
The Story of My Life: With her letters (1887-1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, by John Albert Macy
Keller, Helen
Deafblind women -- United States -- Biography; Keller, Helen, 1880-1968
I have many tree friends in Wrentham. One of them, a splendid oak, is
the special pride of my heart. I take all my other friends to see this
king-tree. It stands on a bluff overlooking King Philip's Pond, and
those who are wise in tree lore say it must have stood there eight
hundred or a thousand years. There is a tradition that under this tree
King Philip, the heroic Indian chief, gazed his last on earth and sky.
I had another tree friend, gentle and more approachable than the great
oak--a linden that grew in the dooryard at Red Farm. One afternoon,
during a terrible thunderstorm, I felt a tremendous crash against the
side of the house and knew, even before they told me, that the linden
had fallen. We went out to see the hero that had withstood so many
tempests, and it wrung my heart to see him prostrate who had mightily
striven and was now mightily fallen.
But I must not forget that I was going to write about last summer in
particular. As soon as my examinations were over, Miss Sullivan and I
hastened to this green nook, where we have a little cottage on one of
the three lakes for which Wrentham is famous. Here the long, sunny days
were mine, and all thoughts of work and college and the noisy city were
thrust into the background. In Wrentham we caught echoes of what was
happening in the world--war, alliance, social conflict. We heard of the
cruel, unnecessary fighting in the far-away Pacific, and learned of the
struggles going on between capital and labour. We knew that beyond the
border of our Eden men were making history by the sweat of their brows
when they might better make a holiday. But we little heeded these
things. These things would pass away; here were lakes and woods and
broad daisy-starred fields and sweet-breathed meadows, and they shall
endure forever.
People who think that all sensations reach us through the eye and the
ear have expressed surprise that I should notice any difference, except
possibly the absence of pavements, between walking in city streets
and in country roads. They forget that my whole body is alive to the
conditions about me. The rumble and roar of the city smite the nerves of
my face, and I feel the ceaseless tramp of an unseen multitude, and the
dissonant tumult frets my spirit. The grinding of heavy wagons on hard
pavements and the monotonous clangour of machinery are all the more
torturing to the nerves if one's attention is not diverted by the
panorama that is always present in the noisy streets to people who can
see.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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