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Other words soon followed, and ere long the mystery of speech was comprehended. Tom took his place in the kindergarten classes and learned all that was taught the other boys. Reading, writing, arithmetic, sloid, gymnastics, and other studies were undertaken; and to-day, in almost all respects save such as are entirely dependent upon eye and ear, he is as well educated as the average boy of his years.

Helen remained only a short time at the kindergarten, assisting in the teaching of her charge. Before very long she removed to another city, and while her interest in him continued unabated, she was unable to be with him or to meet him.

Now, after a separation of some years, Helen has again met her little protégé; but it was not the Tommy Stringer whom she rescued from a black and living tomb five years ago. That was a fearsome, weak, and untrained child --

An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.

Physically and mentally he was as pitiful a spectacle as one's eyes would care to behold. Scarcely able to walk, knowing no word or sign, he was less than an animal, save for his soul and the possibilities within him.

The Tom Stringer who now sat by Helen Keller's side, his fingers nimbly speaking to hers, his face lighted up by a smile of happy intelligence, was a new boy -- a ransomed soul. The trembling limbs and attitude of fear had been supplanted by a confident, manly carriage and a sturdy, robust physique. Once the boy's mind was an utter blank; but now fingers and tongue could not move rapidly enough to ask all the questions of his inquiring brain, or to convey the messages that his full soul longed to speak. Then all was ignorance; now few other boys of ten can surpass in many lines the knowledge of Tom Stringer.

But it is of the meeting of these two wonderful children that I would here write. Helen had been for weeks longing to see her little friend, and to many verbal messages had added her own written invitation to Tom and his teachers to visit her at her Cambridge home. Tom himself, although recalling little or nothing of his past acquaintance with Helen, and altogether ignorant of the debt he owed her, had begun to look forward with pleasure to the visit.

I fear that Helen's greetings to her old friends, Tom's teachers, were not so protracted as they otherwise would have been; for all the while that she was welcoming them in feminine fashion, her hand was quietly moving about to discover, if possible, her long-desired visitor. When she did touch his head, her fingers ran over it lightly for an instant, and then her arms were about his neck. The expressive features of the blind girl lighted up with a rare joy, and throughout the visit her countenance was shining.

"What a fine big boy he is! The dear little fellow!" was her contradictory exclamation of delight when at last she found her voice. Then her swift-moving fingers began to spell messages of affection into Tom's chubby fist. All this time she was running her other hand over his face, or lifting up his hands to her own face and curls. Tom's comment of pleasure on touching her soft hair delighted her.

It was many moments before Miss Sullivan, Helen's devoted friend and teacher, could persuade her pupil, with the small company of friends, to be seated. The two blind and deaf children, by some subtle instinct, seemed to know at once their community of interest, and together they sat in a wide window-seat, talking with eagerness and ease, and absorbed in each other.

This is not the place to report fully the merry chatter and eager words of these two souls, that so marvelously dwell apart from the world in their realm of innocence.

Tom's originality is a keen delight to his friends; and one of his latest fancies is the building of a mythical "pleasure house" for himself. It is to contain ninety-four rooms, which he has peopled with imaginary characters. This he needs must describe at length to Helen, to her amusement and enjoyment. As one fancy after another was revealed to her, she broke out into exclamations of wonderment and pleasure. "What a romantic name!" she commented, when Tom told her that "New Garden" was to be the site of his great abode. Of course, New Garden, like the names of many of the people who are to share Tom's mansion, is entirely a fiction of his own brain. Helen's interest in this story was unabated from beginning to end, and she interrupted the narrative several times to remark on it or to ask questions. Throughout, it was punctuated by the spontaneous laughter that is one of Helen's most beautiful characteristics.

The strangeness of their meeting impressed her deeply. She stopped her conversation with Tom long enough to speak of this. She had been reading Tom's hand, following the movements of his fingers, as he spelled out the words with a rapidity that would make an inexperienced onlooker dizzy, by keeping her own hand partly closed over his. "I suppose Tom is not used to having people read his hand in this way," she suggested.