Blind Jack's proper name was John Metcalfe, and he was born in the town of Knaresborough in Yorkshire, in 1717. His parents seem to have been comfortably off--small farmers perhaps, as we are told that Jack learned to ride on his father's horses; and at four years old he was sent to school, exactly as a child of working people would be now. The boy was very quick and had a good memory and his teachers were proud of him, and prophesied that he would be a great scholar, and who knew if some day he might not be Lord Chancellor, or even Archbishop of Canterbury? The Metcalfes quite agreed that nothing was more likely; but a sudden end was put to these dreams when one morning Jack woke with a rash all over his face and chest, and the doctor declared he had got small-pox. Now in those times, before babies were vaccinated, small-pox was a most terrible disease and very few lived through it without being marked in one way or another. Jack was very ill, but he does not appear to have been pitted like some of the other children who suffered from it, and only his mother observed that when the crisis was over and the boy was getting better every day, and beginning to chatter again, he did not, as was usual with him, make remarks on the things he saw around him or out of the window. Then a dreadful fear shot through her heart. Could it be that he was blind? With great difficulty she controlled her voice and answered the child's questions, but with every hour she understood more clearly that what she dreaded had indeed come to pass. By and bye Jack himself wondered why the curtains always seemed to be drawn in his room and asked his mother to pull them back. She invariably had some good excuse for his remaining in the dark, and little by little the truth dawned on him also. We cannot guess at the poor boy's horror at his fate, nor at his struggles to behave like a man, but as he grew gradually accustomed to his darkness and became stronger, he made up his mind, as other blind people have done, that if he was so unlucky as to have lost his eyes, he would learn to get on just as well without them. * * * * *