that he or she is one of a great many whose incessant demands
have entirely outrun my power of answering them as fully as the
applicants might wish and perhaps expect.

I could make a very interesting volume of the letters I have received
from correspondents unknown to the world of authorship, but writing from
an instinctive impulse, which many of them say they have long felt and
resisted. One must not allow himself to be flattered into an
overestimate of his powers because he gets many letters expressing a
peculiar attraction towards his books, and a preference of them to those
with which he would not have dared to compare his own. Still, if the
homo unius libri--the man of one book--choose to select one of our own
writing as his favorite volume, it means something,--not much, perhaps;
but if one has unlocked the door to the secret entrance of one heart, it
is not unlikely that his key may fit the locks of others. What if nature
has lent him a master key? He has found the wards and slid back the bolt
of one lock; perhaps he may have learned the secret of others. One
success is an encouragement to try again. Let the writer of a truly
loving letter, such as greets one from time to time, remember that,
though he never hears a word from it, it may prove one of the best
rewards of an anxious and laborious past, and the stimulus of a still
aspiring future.

Among the letters I have recently received, none is more interesting than
the following. The story of Helen Keller, who wrote it, is told in the
well-known illustrated magazine called "The Wide Awake," in the number
for July, 1888. For the account of this little girl, now between nine
and ten years old, and other letters of her writing, I must refer to the
article I have mentioned. It is enough to say that she is deaf and dumb
and totally blind. She was seven years old when her teacher, Miss
Sullivan, under the direction of Mr. Anagnos, at the Blind Asylum at
South Boston, began her education. A child fuller of life and happiness
it would be hard to find. It seems as if her soul was flooded with light
and filled with music that had found entrance to it through avenues
closed to other mortals. It is hard to understand how she has learned to
deal with abstract ideas, and so far to supplement the blanks left by the
senses of sight and hearing that one would hardly think of her as wanting
in any human faculty. Remember Milton's pathetic picture of himself,
suffering from on