ERICK ARTHUR (1847- ), American artist, was born at Tuskegee,
Alabama, on the 10th of November 1847. He began as a draughtsman in New
York for the American Bank Note Company in 1864-1865, and studied art in
the same years at the Brooklyn Art School and at the National Academy of
Design; but he went to Paris in 1866 and became a pupil of J.L. Gerome.
Paris then became his headquarters. A trip to Egypt in 1873-1874 resulted
in pictures of the East that attracted immediate attention, and his large
and important composition, "The Funeral Procession of a Mummy on the Nile,"
in the Paris Salon (1877), bought by James Gordon Bennett, brought him the
cross of the Legion of Honour. Other paintings by him were "An American
Circus in Normandy," "Procession of the Bull Apis" (now in the Corcoran Art
Gallery, Washington), and a "Rumanian Lady" (in the Temple collection,
Philadelphia).

BRIDGMAN, LAURA DEWEY (1829-1889), American blind deaf-mute, was born on
the 21st of December 1829 at Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S.A., being the
third daughter of Daniel Bridgman (d. 1868), a substantial Baptist farmer,
and his wife Harmony, daughter of Cushman Downer, and grand-daughter of
Joseph Downer, one of the five first settlers (1761) of Thetford, Vermont.
Laura was a delicate infant, puny and rickety, and was subject to fits up
to twenty months old, but otherwise seemed to have normal senses; at two
years, however, she had a very bad attack of scarlet fever, which destroyed
sight and hearing, blunted the sense of smell, and left her system a wreck.
Though she gradually recovered health she remained a blind deaf-mute, but
was kindly treated and was in particular made a sort of playmate by an
eccentric bachelor friend of the Bridgmans, Mr Asa Tenney, who as soon as
she could walk used to take her for rambles a-field. In 1837 Mr James
Barrett, of Dartmouth College, saw her and mentioned her case to Dr Mussey,
the head of the medical department, who wrote an account which attracted
the attention of Dr S.G. Howe (_q.v._), the head of the Perkins Institution
for the Blind at Boston. He determined to try to get the child into the
Institution and to attempt to educate her; her parents assented, and in
October 1837 Laura entered the school. Though the loss of her eye-balls
occasioned some deformity, she was otherwise a comely child and of a
sensitive and affectionate nature; she had become familiar with the world
about her, and was imitative in so far as