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Updated: June 21, 2025
While the main purpose of the institution is to make producers of men with a serious handicap, another great aim is to brighten their lives and create in them that buoyant spirit the moral of life that is half the battle. I began the study of Braille with Miss Gilles, a New Zealand lady, as my instructor, while I was at St. Mark's Hospital. I was first given a wooden box full of holes.
I gave her my braille slate to play with, thinking that the mechanical pricking of holes in the paper would amuse her and rest her mind. But what was my astonishment when I found that the little witch was writing letters! I had no idea she knew what a letter was. She has often gone with me to the post-office to mail letters, and I suppose I have repeated to her things I wrote to you.
Into these holes my teacher showed me how to put nails with large heads, the nails being placed in cells to correspond with the Braille alphabet. After I had succeeded in grasping the principle of Braille by means of the nails which, by the way, I frequently jabbed into my fingers instead of into the holes I was given a card with the alphabet on it.
It is true that I am perfectly familiar with all literary braille English, American, and New York Point; but the method of writing the various signs used in Geometry and Algebra in the three systems is very different, and two days before the examinations I knew only the English method. I had used it all through my school work, and never any other system.
Braille is taught to enable the sightless to read for themselves, and typewriting in order that it will not be so hard on their friends, as it is much easier for the blind to learn to typewrite than it is for the sighted to learn to read Braille. It took me four months to master Braille, but I passed my typewriting test in less than three weeks.
In Geometry, my chief difficulty was, that I had always been accustomed to reading the propositions in Line Print, or having them spelled into my hand; and somehow, although the propositions were right before me, yet the braille confused me, and I could not fix in my mind clearly what I was reading.
Adrian was sitting reading in bed, the forefinger of his left hand tracing the Braille characters, when his nephew noticed that a pencil the old man held in his right hand was moving slowly along the opposite page. He left his seat in the window and sat down beside the bed. The right hand continued to move, and now he could see plainly that they were letters and words which it was forming.
The college authorities did not allow Miss Sullivan to read the examination papers to me; so Mr. Eugene C. Vining, one of the instructors at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, was employed to copy the papers for me in American braille. Mr. Vining was a stranger to me, and could not communicate with me, except by writing braille.
And, if he is already something of a musician, as that huge grand piano, with no knick-knacks on it indicates, he may begin that sort of thing at once, before he is ready to be worried with the Braille system, or any other method of instructing the blind.
After leaving St. Mark's, I spent three idle weeks at Folkestone. As a result, when I arrived at St. Dunstan's I had to begin my Braille all over again. My teacher at St.
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