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All difficulties in the general work vanished as we went on. The teacher of German became interested and learned to read to Helen with her hand. Others did the same. Though Miss Sullivan found herself fully occupied, as usual, she had helpers in reading the great amount that Helen needed in English, French, and German. We had, however, difficulty in getting books made promptly enough, in spite of the willingness of friends in London, in Philadelphia, and elsewhere to hasten all such work. The Perkins Institution lent us some books, but there were others that it was necessary to have put into Braille specially for our use. The avidity with which Helen read whatever was placed within her range kept her always ahead of the respective lessons. School-girls sometimes study as though it were a "task," as indeed our fathers called it, but Helen never. With her a new text-book was a fresh and delightful field for investigation. Difficulties were merely new heights to be scaled. The exhilaration of overcoming obstacles kept this school-girl as much interested as another might be in achieving conquest in a game of golf or tennis.

The actual school work during the year showed little difference between the treatment of Helen and the other pupils. Miss Sullivan sat at Helen's side in the classes, interpreting to her with infinite patience the instruction of every teacher. In study-hours Miss Sullivan's labors were even more arduous, for she was obliged to read everything that Helen had to learn, excepting what was prepared in Braille; she searched the lexicons and encyclopædias, and gave Helen the benefit of it all. When Helen went home Miss Sullivan went with her, and it was hers to satisfy the busy, unintermitting demands of the intensely active brain, for, though others gladly helped, there were many matters which could be treated only by the one teacher who had awakened the activity and had followed its development from the first. Now it was a German grammar which had to be read, now a French story, and then some passage from Caesar's Commentaries. It looked like drudgery, and drudgery it would certainly have been had not love shed its benign influence over all, lightening each step and turning hardship into pleasure.

Space will not permit me to dwell at large on the steps of progress. It was in reading and studying with Helen that my insight of her mind became the clearest. I read Shakespeare with her, and she showed the greatest pleasure in the light and amusing touches in "As You Like It," as well as in the serious passages of "King Henry V." We took up Burke's celebrated speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, and every point made an impression. The political bearing of the arguments, the justice or injustice of this or that, the history of the times, the characters of the actors, the meaning of the words and the peculiarities of style, all came under review, whether I wished it or not, by the force of Helen's interest.

Without a break, we took up Macaulay's Essay on Samuel Johnson, and the interest flagged. There was no such stimulus in the style as I had noticed in reading Burke. There was sympathy for the poor literary man, there was amusement at his strange life, there was rejoicing at every one of his successes, and there was appreciation for the fluent style of Macaulay; but everything was easy. There were few words to be explained, no difficulties to be overcome. I was sorry to see the lack of interest, and suddenly one day I stopped and instituted a comparison of the style of Burke and Macaulay. At once the former interest returned. There was now something to do which was worthy of doing. The mind was obliged to exert itself, and so long as this was the case Helen was absorbed.

While reading Burke, I made a memorandum of certain words that Helen did not understand, and of others which she had no difficulty with. Here are some that she did not understand:

Here are some of the words that Helen had no difficulty with:

It is unnecessary to say that many of these words are used by Burke in senses quite different from those now in vogue.

When we encountered "heterogeneous," Helen said, "I have never seen that word, but it is evidently of Greek origin," though she had not studied Greek. When Burke said that Parliament had disarmed Wales by statute, and now proposed to disarm America by "an instruction," Helen quietly remarked, "Rather polite, was it not?" When I explained the meaning of "chicane," and showed her the particular trick of the New Englanders by which they nullified an act of Parliament, Helen exclaimed at once, "That was the way in which the case was decided in 'The Merchant of Venice!' It was a legal quibble that Bellario taught Portia." This leads me to remark again, as I have done before, in print, I think, that the more I study the action of Helen's mind, the more emphatic becomes my conviction that its logical action is its most pronounced and peculiar trait. I took occasion to test her verbal memory in connection with the list of words that she had not understood. I went over them just before the June examinations to see how much of the explanations that had been given her she could recall. The study of Burke had extended from the close of February to the first of April. It was now about the first of June. Many of the words were still not comprehended fully, though they had been at the time of the reading in April and March. The explanation was repeated.