, how their friends, and those they love, look who people this
world of sleeping fancy. I have never had the courage to ask those
blind people whom I know, but this soldier to whom I talked, told me
that every night when he goes to bed he prays that he may
dream--because in his dreams he is not blind, in his dreams he can see,
and he is once more happy. I could have sobbed aloud when he told me,
but to sob over the inevitable is useless--better make happier the
world which is a fact. But I realised that this dream-sight gave him
inestimable comfort. It gave him something to think about in the
darkness of the day. It was a change from always thinking about the
past--the past when he could laugh and shout, run wild and enjoy
himself as other boys enjoy their lives. And this blinded soldier used
to be reading--always reading. I used to chaff him about it, calling
him a book-worm, urging him to go to theatres, tea-parties, long walks.
He laughed, but shook his head. Then he told me that, although he
never used to care much for reading, books were now one of the comforts
of his life. "When I feel blind," he said--"and we don't always feel
blind, you know, when we are in the right company among people who know
how to treat us as if we were not children, and as if we were not
deaf--I pick up a book, and, if I stick to it and concentrate, I begin
to lose remembrance and to live in the story I am reading and among the
people of the tale. And--_it is more like seeing the world than
anything else I do!_"

_How to Help_

I must confess, his remark gave me an additional respect for those huge
volumes of books written in Braille which he always carried about with
him than I had ever felt before. When you and I are "fed up" with life
and everybody surrounding us--and we all have these moods--we can
escape open grousing by taking a long walk, or by seeing fresh people
and fresh places, watching, thinking, and amusing ourselves in a new
fashion. But the blind have only books--they alone are the only handy
means by which they can get away from the present and lose themselves
amid surroundings new and strange. All the more need, then, for us to
help along the good work done by the National Library for the Blind.
It needs more helpers, and it needs more money. Working with the
absolute minimum of staff and outside expenses, it is achieving the
maximum amount of good. As a library, I have only to tell you that it
cont