eir number, the places they lived in, the work they did, their
homes and social condition. Note-books full of facts and dates and
numbers testify to the activity of this time. And then once again her
attention was directed to the blind teacher in the Avenue Road School.

In the autumn of 1853, she was then twenty-seven years old, she wrote to
ask Mr. W. Hanks Levy to call upon her in Queen Anne Street. She said
she had been told that he could give her the information she wanted as
to the condition and requirements of the blind.

FOOTNOTE:

[5] MS. Sermon on the Blind, Rev. F. D. Maurice.

CHAPTER VII

THE BLIND MANAGER

"While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good."
MARCUS AURELIUS.

The interview in Queen Anne Street was one of the most important events
in Bessie's life.

Her feeble health, her limited opportunities of ascertaining the
condition of the poor, her imperfect knowledge of their requirements and
their powers, made it imperative that she should find an ally with
health and energy, with experience that might supplement her own, and
with equal devotion to the cause she had at heart.

W. Hanks Levy, who called at her request to tell her about the blind
poor, was one of whom she had often heard, and with whom she had already
corresponded. He was an assistant teacher at the school in Avenue Road,
married to the matron of the girls' department.

Levy was of humble origin and blind from early youth. His education,
such as it was, had been received at the Avenue Road School, but he was
essentially self-taught. Outside of the narrow routine of the school he
had worked and striven to obtain knowledge, to find help for himself and
others. He was a man of small stature and of slender build, with
plentiful dark hair on head and face. He wore darkened spectacles, which
covered the sightless eyes. His nose was large and well formed, and the
mouth fairly good. All the features were marked by extreme mobility, a
sensitive tremulousness often seen in the blind. It is as if they did
their thinking outside. Bessie had this same tremulous mobility of
feature; her soul fluttered as it were about a thought, and you saw
hope, apprehension, joy, fear, or dismay when it was first presented to
her.

Levy was a man of eager intelligence and generous heart. He earnestly
desired the amelioration of the condition of the blind. Their
disabilities had pressed up