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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."