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IN a sunny southern home in the town of Tuscumbia, Alabama, some fourteen years ago, was born a little girl whom destiny had marked for a wonderful career. Through her tiny veins ran the blood of Colonel Alexander Moore, General Robert E. Lee, and Edward Everett Hale, an illustrious ancestry, but one she was destined to honor, in a unique way, before reaching maturity, It is rare if not unprecedented, that a child of fourteen should pass so generally into current literature as has Helen Adams Keller.

Every one has heard of this phenomenal blind and deaf girl; many have seen her or at least read her simple life-story written, originally, for the Youth's Companion. Those who are prone to discount her fame as an exaggeration of over-fond friends need only spend an hour in her presence to be convinced that the little girl is a prodigy among prodigies.

A sketch of her life -- a life so rare in its details as to need no literary art to make it thrilling, will serve to present what is a world-wide study.

Helen was the first child to enter the home of Major Arthur Keller, and as the little girl writes in her autobiography, "My mother watched me coming and going, laughing, prattling, with proud happy eyes. I was her only child, and she thought there never had been another baby quite so beautiful as her little Helen."

When she was eighteen months old, scarlet fever deprived her of both sight and hearing, although the fact did not force itself upon the unhappy parents until some time after her recovery. It was one of those soul-tragedies with an old-new plot which the parents of every deaf child know by heart. What hero in battle ever opposed his foe with such despairing energy as the mother fights the growing conviction, "My child is deaf!"

The record of Helen's life from this period gives us a rare peep into the wonderland of a child's soul. Our memories of babyhood, of the first, vague questionings and the evolution of our primitive philosophy, are either indistinct or obliterated by the multitude of after-impressions. Living, day after day, in a world of silence and darkness, Helen's ideas were unique and somewhat late in development, hence many of them are pre-served in her wonderful memory.

The speech-idea, which must be evolving itself in the baby's mind when he lisps his first "goo-goo," came to Helen as follows:

"When I was a very little child, I used to sit in my mother's lap nearly all the time because I was very timid and did not like to be left by myself, and I would keep my little hand on her face all the while, because it amused me to feel her face and lips move when she talked with people. I did not know, then, what she was doing, for I was quite ignorant of all things. Then, when I was older, I learned to play with my nurse and the little negro children, and I noticed that they kept moving their lips' just like my mother; so I moved mine, too, but sometimes it made me angry and I would hold my playmates' mouths very hard. I did not know, then, that it was very naughty to do so."

It was a long step from this vague wondering to the actual use of speech, but several years later the chasm was spanned.

Another echo from this strange childhood tells of her first knowledge of pain. Her temperament was sunny, and she had been shielded by her misfortune from contact with the sadder phases of life. Hence this seems like a fresh entrance of sorrow into Eden. She writes:

"Before I learned to read I thought everybody was happy, and at first I was grieved to know about pain and great sorrows."

Her perplexity increased until she finally wrote a childish letter to Bishop Phillips Brooks, asking him why her Father in Heaven thought it best for His children to have pain and sorrow sometimes, and adding pathetically, "Please tell me something you know about God."

As the little girl grew out of babyhood she learned to express her wants in simple gestures, but their inadequacy often angered her. When she was six years old her father went to the director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind, where Laura Bridgman was educated, asking for a teacher. The final answer came some time afterward in the person of Miss Annie Sullivan, a lady who had been blind, but whose sight was then fully restored. There is something inexpressibly pathetic in the story of her arrival as Helen tells it

"My mother had made me understand, in a vague way, that a lady was coming who would have something to do with me. . .There I stood, clinging to the lattice of the porch, wistfully waiting for I knew not what. . .Suddenly I felt approaching footsteps; they came nearer; I stretched out my little hand eagerly; some one took it, and in another instant I was in my teacher's arms. . .We could not speak to each other. I could not ask her why she had come. Yet I am sure I felt, in a vague, bewildered way, that something beautiful was going to happen to me."

This is almost an allegory of the approach of human fate.

One is naturally curious to know by what avenue a teacher would reach so circumscribed a mind. A beginning was made at once. In unpacking her trunk Miss Sullivan took from it a beautiful doll, which she presented to her little charge. After Helen's curiosity had been satisfied Miss Sullivan took the tiny hand and spelled doll in letters of the manual alphabet. Helen speaks of this as finger-play; for, at first, it was nothing more to her than an agreeable exercise of her tiny pink digits. In the course of two weeks she had learned to spell the names of about twenty articles, but it was still gymnastics, and not language, for she had not caught the idea that a word was the sign of a conception. But one day, while holding her mug under the spout of the pump and spelling w-a-t-e-r at her teacher's direction, the conception of language burst upon her, and she was scarcely able to contain the grandeur of the thought. "Until that day," she says, "My mind had been like a darkened chamber, waiting for words to enter and light the lamp, which is thought."

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Her progress from this time was phenomenally rapid. It was and has ever since been a mind wholly consecrated to the service of learning. We sometimes wonder when she allowed herself time to play; for her powers were all focused on knowledge, and the eye of her mind was constantly alert. In this respect she was the ideal pupil so often sighed for by the weary teacher, so rarely realized.

An idea of the rapidity with which her mind developed may be gained from the fact that in April of 1887 the child who a month previously had been without a language or an idea of one was expressing thought in sentences. This she did at first in connection with objects. Being supplied with slips of paper containing words printed in raised letters, she would lay them on the corresponding objects, thus expressing, "Helen is in wardrobe;" "Box is on table;" The next step was to arrange the slips in a frame in the proper order to form sentences.

The methods ordinarily used with blind children were soon discarded, as the little pupil's intelligence overleaped conventional bounds and rendered intermediate steps in the educational process unnecessary. In an incredibly short time she could write, read books in raised letters, and spell manually, receiving the communications of others by having them spelled in her hand.

After fifteen months' instruction in her own home, Helen accompanied her teacher to the Perkins Institution in Boston, where Miss Sullivan continued her instruction for several years, with the splendid opportunities afforded by that school in the way of cabinets of specimens, stuffed animals, embossed books, etc.

It was there that Helen discovered that her little associates (blind but not deaf) had other means of communication than hers, and the question immediately sprang to her mind, "Do deaf children ever learn to speak?" Her teacher explained that they did, but it was very difficult, and they acquired speech by watching their teachers' lips.

"But could I not feel your mouth? "asked Helen.

For a child without hearing or any recollection of sound, and furthermore, with no sight to apprehend the visible elements of speech, to learn to articulate seemed too near the miraculous to come within the domain of education; so Helen went sorrowing, for a time, under the assurance that it was too difficult. But she had a hope that certainly was the earnest of fulfilment, and repeatedly spelled "I must speak." She was finally taken to Miss Sarah Fuller, a teacher of articulation in the Horace Mann School for the Deaf, where, in ten lessons, she mastered the elements of speech. It would take more space than we can command to sketch the details of this remarkable accomplishment. Suffice it to say that the sensitive fingers took the place of eyes and ears as the eager pupil explored Miss Fuller's lips, mouth and external throat to find the position of teeth, tongue and trachea in forming the different sounds, and that owing to absolute concentration her imitation of them was accurate.

It is a touching tribute to her unselfish nature that her first thought, on learning that she could speak, was of the joy it would give others. She writes:

"How glad my mother will be. I can hardly wait for June to come, I am so eager to speak to her and my little sister. Mildred could not understand me when I spelled with my fingers, but now she will sit on my lap and I will tell her many things to please her."

Painstaking practice has been required to develop her use of vocal language, but at the present writing her articulation is superior to that of most of the deaf who are assisted in learning by their vision. And what is yet more wonderful, she reads the speech of others by placing her fingers where the lips of the speaker play lightly upon them. Her studies are partly conducted by having books read to her in this manner.

For months, after her first lessons in speech, Helen was obliged to discontinue study, as the intense strain of that effort had impaired her health. She entirely recovered, however, and is pursuing studies in English literature, history, mathematics, Latin, French, etc., with unflagging zeal.

We venture no prophecy of the future; but it is safe to say that, thus far, Helen Keller is an educational prodigy without a parallel. Doubly handicapped by nature, she has not only risen to the level of her fully endowed fellows, but, in command of language and actual acquirements, has out-stripped them.

In what measure we may regard this girl as abnormal, or how far she is simply a skillful development of normal faculties, it is impossible to say. The scrutiny of science is focused upon her from all sides. The scalpel of psychology is busily probing her perceptions and the spectroscope of psychic science is analyzing her faculties. We can weigh a hair and measure a sunbeam; but the instruments to examine faculties are not so easily constructed.

No exhaustive analysis of Helen Keller's powers has yet been attempted, and those who seek to account for her accomplishments are only partly successful. There are yet unknown quantities in the equation. We cannot justly adopt the deaf child as a standard of comparison, for any one familiar with the inflexible expression of the deaf will realize how Helen's command of idiomatic language places her in-comparably above her fellows in affliction.

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Dr. Oliver Wendall Holmes, to whom the little girl made a memorable visit, writes: "I am surprised at the mastery of language that your letter shows. It almost makes me think the world would get along as well without the senses of sight and hearing as with them. Perhaps people would be better in a great many ways, for they could not fight as they do now. Just think of an army of blind people with guns and cannon. Think of the poor drummers! Of what use would they and their drum-sticks be?. . . It does great credit not only to you but to your instructors who have so broken down the walls that seemed to shut you in that now your outlook seems more bright and cheerful than that of many seeing and hearing children."

Her chaste, beautiful language Helen owes to her marvellous memory and the choiceness of her environment. Hers is a mind that retains the language poured into in without conscious effort. No expression, turn of thought, or figure seems ever to escape her. When we remember that her little world has been a choicely circumscribed one, her associates cultured people, and that from the loose, ungrammatical talk which unconsciously corrupts a child's diction she has been removed by her affliction, we can realize from what pure sources she draws her language. In her store-house are the treasures of Whittier, Holmes, Tennyson, Longfellow, retained not merely in their substance but pre-serving the very language-mold in which they were cast. When she wishes to clothe her thoughts, all this wealth is hers upon demand without the search for words and similes which a less nimble memory necessitates. Dr. A. Grahman -sic- Bell, in a paper read before the National Acaddemy -sic- of Sciences at Washington, characterizes this phenomenon as unconscious plagiarism. We must not, however, regard Helen's language as a dilution of classic literature. This it would be if memory were her only great endowment. But to it is wedded a powerful imagination that creates where the single faculty would reproduce. Her conversation sparkles with figures, descriptions, and pretty conceits which doubtless draw their substance from the writings of great authors; but they are so tinted and re-arranged by Helen's rich fancy that they become, practically, her own. Note the graceful fancies in the following, culled from her every-day speech:

One day, while gathering flowers about some hillside springs in Alabama, she exclaimed; "The mountains are crowding around the springs to look at their own beautiful reflection."

Referring, at another time, to a visit in Lexington, Mass,, she writes. "As we rode along, we could see the forest monarchs bend their proud forms to listen to the little children of the woodlands whispering their secrets. The anemone, the wild violet, the hepatica, and the funny little curled-up ferns all peeped out at us from beneath the brown leaves."

"I think the flowers are God's smiles," she remarked one day. "When the flower wilts, the perfume is its soul going up to God.

To these two faculties of memory and imagination, the little pupil owes not only the clothing of her thought but her wonderful store of information, A schedule of what she has studied would give but a meagre idea of her knowledge. There seems to be absolutely no subject on which she cannot converse intelligently. At the public receptions held for her in several of our great cities, she has been the centre of curious circles of educators, scientists, philosophers, ministers, men of every school of thought, and these have plied her with questions from their several standpoints. The answers which fall from her lips are little short of marvellous.

Even if we accept the psychological theory that what gains a lodgment in the mind is never really forgotten, the wonder still remains; for memory may indeed preserve the records of all that enters the mind, but it is quite another matter to persuade it to give up the facts at the right time. Helen's facility for recalling is nearly perfect, and her knowledge is so classified that she knows just where to turn for the most diverse material.

In what degree may this girl be regarded as a revelation of the possibilities within the reach of every child?

No close comparison can fairly be made between her and the ordinary child; for aside from the question of abnormal endowment, she owes much of her memory development to her very affliction. She lives in a world of absolute quiet and darkness, undistracted by the multitude of impressions that approach us simultaneously through eye and ear. In her studies but one sense (that of touch) is on strict duty at a time. Through manual spelling or speech manually apprehended ideas are presented with no rival impressions to efface them. The most perfect concentration (on which memory so largely depends) is thus possible. With powers accurately focussed on the entering thought, it makes an intense, clear-cut impression somewhat like that we occasionally receive when one sense is unduly exalted, and the others, for the time, are in abeyance.

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To the vividness of first impression is added the advantage of meditation. Helen has only to withdraw her hand, and the current of communication is cut off. She is then free to arrange her thoughts and ruminate upon her mental store as no appliance of art enables us to do.

But all this would be of little value if she were not gifted with a wonderful imagination. This faculty must be in almost constant use; for her world is a picture gallery, and imagination must paint, from the suggestion of three senses, the things ordinarily supplied by five. The daily occurrences of the home life become history as they pass through spelling to reach her, and imagination vivifies them before she can be responsive. It is no wonder, then, that the fictitious persons she meets in books are almost as real as the friends about her, and that the pages of ancient history glow with as much color as the day just ended.

This nimbleness of the imagination is nature's greatest compensation for her loss of sight and hearing; for, although the remaining senses are quickened, they could not possibly supply the materials she must have for an adequate conception of the universe. A word, a mere suggestion of natural features, and the scene is hers. She goes to Niagara and stands in the presence of the cataract that speaks so powerfully through eye and ear, but has only faint messages for any other sense. Beyond the dashing of the spray and the vibration of the ground we wonder what can possibly appeal to her. At the base of the falls she receives a description of the scene. Imagination is on the alert. The most ardent lover of nature could not be more enraptured than she becomes. An eye-witness thus describes the scene:

"No one whose privilege it was to be there will ever forget the varied emotions expressed in her face. She said but little, yet every action betrayed her excitement. Finally, with her face wreathed in smiles, she said, in a hushed voice, with a marvelously significant cadence: "I feel the tremble." She then unpinned the lovely rose she wore upon her dress that morning, and extending her arm as far as possible beyond the railing, dropped it into the rushing torrent, saying, 'The rose is buried on its passionate heart -- the river carries it away, I can see its grandeur and beauty . . . . I think I have the same sensation that I had when I first stood beside the great ocean -- a feeling of awe and reverence mingled with a little fear. I think I shall feel the same when I stand in St. Peter's and at the foot of Mt. Blanc.'"

With Helen's mental alertness is co-ordinated a great quickening of the senses. This finds practical use in a hundred ways, not the least important being her ability to read a rapid manipulation of the fingers on the back of her hand, on her arm, her neck, her face -- anywhere the speaker may choose to spell to her.

Visitors at the World's Fair may have noticed, in a department of the Anthropological Building, mechanical apparatus for testing memory, accuracy of sense-perception, susceptibility to pain, etc. Helen was subjected to these various tests with very significant results. A minute description of these is impossible here, but their record shows remarkable strength of memory, and an incomparable delicacy of sense-perception through touch.

What light Helen Keller may yet throw on psychology, education, or psychic science we dare not prophesy. But to the layman, unincumbered by scientific spectacles, she is one of the purest and loveliest of nature's children. Whatever diagnosis of her case the learned doctors may make, there will be none more beautiful (nor, perhaps, nearer the truth) than her own given at Niagara Falls: "Do you think it is strange that I should like to be here? No; it is not strange; for God has planted in our hearts the power to feel the mystery unfolding us."