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When she referred to our conversation again, it was to ask, "Why did not Jesus go away, so that his enemies could not find him?" She thought the miracles of Jesus very strange. When told that Jesus walked on the sea to meet his disciples, she said, decidedly, "it does not mean walked, it means swam." When told of the instance in which Jesus raised the dead, she was much perplexed, saying, "I did not know life could come back into the dead body!"

One day she said, sadly: "I am blind and deaf. That is why I cannot see God." I taught her the word invisible, and told her we could not see God with our eyes, because he was a spirit; but that when our hearts were full of goodness and gentleness, then we saw him because then we were more like him.

At another time she asked, "what is a soul?" "No one knows what the soul is like," I replied; "but we know that it is not the body, and it is that part of us which thinks and loves and hopes, and which Christian people believe will live on after the body is dead." I then asked her, "can you think of your soul as separate from your body?" "Oh, yes!" she replied; "because last hour I was thinking very hard of Mr. Anagnos, and then my mind," -- then changing the word, -- "my soul was in Athens, but my body was here in the parlor." At this moment another thought seemed to flash through her mind, and she added, "but Mr. Anagnos did not speak to my soul." I explained to her that the soul, too, is invisible, or, in other words, that it is without apparent form. "But if I write what my soul thinks," she said, "then it will be visible, and the words will be its body."

A long time ago Helen said to me, "I would like to live sixteen hundred years." When asked if she would not like to live always in a beautiful country called heaven, her first question was, "where is heaven?" I was obliged to confess that I did not know, but suggested that it might be on one of the stars. A moment after she said: "Will you please go first and tell me all about it?" and then she added, "Tuscumbia is a very beautiful little town." It was more than a year before she alluded to the subject again, and when she did return to it, her field of inquiry had been enlarged, and her questions were numerous and persistent. She would ask: "Where is heaven, and what is it like? Why cannot we know as much about heaven as we do about foreign countries?" I told her in very simple language that there may be many places called heaven, but that essentially it was a condition, -- the fulfilment of the heart's desire, the satisfaction of its wants; and that heaven existed wherever right was acknowledged, believed in and loved.

She shrinks from the thought of death with evident dismay. Recently, on being shown a deer which had been killed by her brother, she was greatly distressed, and asked sorrowfully, "why must everything die, even the fleet-footed deer?" At another time she asked, "do you not think we would be very much happier always, if we did not have to die?" I said, "no; there is very much more happiness with it, because, if there were no death, our world would soon be so crowded with living creatures that it would be impossible for any of them to live comfortably." "But," said Helen, quickly, "I think God could make some more worlds as well as he made this one."

When friends have told her of the great happiness which awaits her in another life, where she will see and hear and sing with the angels, she instantly asked them, "how do you know, if you have not been dead?"

Notwithstanding her deprivations, her glad and childlike enjoyment of the present existence is so great that assertions with regard to greater happiness in a future life are received with indifference.

The literal sense in which she sometimes takes common words and idioms shows how necessary it is that we should make sure that she receives their correct meaning. When told recently that Hungarians were born musicians, she asked in surprise, "do they sing when they are born?" When her friend added that some of the pupils he had seen in Buda-Pesth had more than one hundred tunes in their heads, she said, laughing, "I think their heads must be very noisy." She sees the ridiculous quickly, and, instead of being seriously troubled by metaphorical language, as some deaf-mutes are, she is often amused at her own too literal conception of its meaning.

One day A. thought she would improve Helen's mind by teaching her the twenty-third psalm. After it had been read to her once or twice, her quick memory retained the strange and (to her) meaningless words, and she was able to repeat the psalm from beginning to end without a mistake. When I came for her she was full of questions, the first being this: "What is a psalm?" After this was explained to her she said, with an air of the greatest amusement, "it said, the Lord is my shepherd! but how can that be? For I am not a sheep!" I told her that David was a poet, and liked to imagine that the world was God's great pasture, and that the people were his sheep, and he their loving and careful shepherd. Her comment on this explanation was: "I do not like to think that I am a sheep at all, and I do not think it would be nice to lie down in the fields, do you?"