When I first knew Arthur Pearson he and Lord Northcliffe were making rival collections of newspapers and magazines. They collected them as other people collect postal cards and cigar-bands. Pearson was then, as he is now, a man of the most remarkable executive ability, of keen intelligence, of untiring nervous energy. That was ten years ago. He knew then that he was going blind. And when the darkness came he accepted the burden; not only his own, but he took upon his shoulders the burden of all the blind in England. He organized the National Institute for those who could not see. He gave them of his energy, which has not diminished; he gave them of his fortune, which, happily for them, has not diminished; he gave them his time, his intelligence. If you ask what the time of a blind man is worth, go to St. Dunstan's and you will find out. You will see a home and school for blind men, run by a blind man. The same efficiency, knowledge of detail, intolerance of idleness, the same generous appreciation of the work of others, that he put into running _The Express_ and _Standard_, he now exerts at St. Dunstan's. It has Pearson written all over it just as a mile away there is a building covered with the name of Selfridge, and a cathedral with the name of Christopher Wren. When I visited him in his room at St. Dunstan's he was standing with his back to the open fire dictating to a stenographer. He called to me cheerily, caught my hand, and showed me where I was to sit. All the time he was looking straight at me and firing questions: "When did you leave Salonika? How many troops have we landed? Our positions are very strong, aren't they?" He told the stenographer she need not wait, and of an appointment he had which she was not to forget. Before she reached the door he remembered two more things she was not to forget. The telephone rang, and, still talking, he walked briskly around a sofa, avoided a table and an armchair, and without fumbling picked up the instrument. What he heard was apparently very good news. He laughed delightedly, saying: "That's fine! That's splendid!" A secretary opened the door and tried to tell him what he had just learned, but was cut short. "I know," said Pearson. "So-and-so has just phoned me. It's fine, isn't it?" He took a small pad from his pocket, made a note on it, and laid the memorandum beside the stenographer's machine. Then he wound his way back to the fireplace and offered a case of cigarettes. He held them within a few inches of my hand. Since I last had seen him he had shaved his mustache and looked ten years younger and, as he exercises every morning, very fit. He might have been an officer of the navy out of uniform. I had been in the room five minutes, and only once, when he wrote on the pad and I saw that as he wrote he did not look at the pad, would I have guessed that he was blind.