ld spell a few words my teacher gave me slips of
cardboard on which were printed words in raised letters. I quickly
learned that each printed word stood for an object, an act, or a
quality. I had a frame in which I could arrange the words in little
sentences; but before I ever put sentences in the frame I used to make
them in objects. I found the slips of paper which represented, for
example, "doll," "is," "on," "bed" and placed each name on its object;
then I put my doll on the bed with the words _is_, _on_, _bed_ arranged
beside the doll, thus making a sentence of the words, and at the same
time carrying out the idea of the sentence with the things themselves.

One day, Miss Sullivan tells me, I pinned the word _girl_ on my
pinafore and stood in the wardrobe. On the shelf I arranged the words,
_is_, _in_, _wardrobe_. Nothing delighted me so much as this game. My
teacher and I played it for hours at a time. Often everything in the
room was arranged in object sentences.

From the printed slip it was but a step to the printed book. I took my
"Reader for Beginners" and hunted for the words I knew; when I found
them my joy was like that of a game of hide-and-seek. Thus I began to
read. Of the time when I began to read connected stories I shall speak
later.

For a long time I had no regular lessons. Even when I studied most
earnestly it seemed more like play than work. Everything Miss Sullivan
taught me she illustrated by a beautiful story or a poem. Whenever
anything delighted or interested me she talked it over with me just as
if she were a little girl herself. What many children think of with
dread, as a painful plodding through grammar, hard sums and harder
definitions, is to-day one of my most precious memories.

I cannot explain the peculiar sympathy Miss Sullivan had with
my pleasures and desires. Perhaps it was the result of long
association with the blind. Added to this she had a wonderful
faculty for description. She went quickly over uninteresting
details, and never nagged me with questions to see if I remembered the
day-before-yesterday's lesson. She introduced dry technicalities of
science little by little, making every subject so real that I could not
help remembering what she taught.

We read and studied out of doors, preferring the sunlit woods to the
house. All my early lessons have in them the breath of the woods--the
fine, resinous odour of pine needles, blended with the perfume of