nued affection I was fondly urged to remain in the institution while
in the city, but, as I had so many resident relatives, I declined.

My cousin, William Heald, who had by his kindness infused light into some
of my darkest hours, had won a lovely woman for a wife, and certainly no
one more richly deserved such a consummation. Cousin Sammy Heald had also
married his fair fiance, of the West, who in her sweet purity of
character, beauty of person and a life fragrant and blossoming with good
deeds, could justly be called a "prairie flower." He had been ordained a
Methodist minister, and was winning true laurels in his little charge in
Iowa, to which conference he belonged. He had chosen his proper vocation,
for as a preacher he was "Native, and to the manor born," for when a wee
boy, he had written and declaimed many a sermon, and had his mimic
audience been a real one these efforts would have produced electrical
effect.

Among the many changes in my Baltimore circle was the vacant chair at the
fireside, once filled by my uncle Jacob Day, whose memory and whose life
was pervaded by the odor of true sanctity. It could truly be said of him
at the sunset of a beautiful life, that

"Each silver hair, each wrinkle there,
Records some good deed done;
Some flower cast along the way,
Some spark from love's bright sun."

He had been a great leader in the Sabbath School movement, and a prominent
feature of the funeral cortege was a procession of his pupils in pure
white raiment, who, in token of their love and bereavement, strewed his
grave with flowers.

I cannot close my home chapter without an expression of exultant pride for
my classmates who have done so nobly in their various vocations. Two had
entered the literary ranks as book-writers, and had met with marked
success in the acceptance and sale of their works; three stood high as
teachers; one earned a good living by tuning pianos; several were engaged
in various departments of the institution; and two ranked high as
musicians, which profession has seemed an especial field for the blind.

To use the musical measure of poetic prose as rendered by Mr. Artman, one
of the most renowned blind authors--"There is a world to which night
brings no gloom, no sadness, no impediments; fills no yawning chasm and
hides from the traveler no pitfall. It is the world of sound. Silence is
its night, the only darkness of which the blind have any knowledge. In it
eve