were content to go hand-in-hand wherever caprice led us, although
she could not understand my finger language, nor I her childish
prattle.



Chapter III

Meanwhile the desire to express myself grew. The few signs I used
became less and less adequate, and my failures to make myself
understood were invariably followed by outbursts of passion. I
felt as if invisible hands were holding me, and I made frantic
efforts to free myself. I struggled--not that struggling helped
matters, but the spirit of resistance was strong within me; I
generally broke down in tears and physical exhaustion. If my
mother happened to be near I crept into her arms, too miserable
even to remember the cause of the tempest. After awhile the need
of some means of communication became so urgent that these
outbursts occurred daily, sometimes hourly.

My parents were deeply grieved and perplexed. We lived a long way
from any school for the blind or the deaf, and it seemed unlikely
that any one would come to such an out-of-the-way place as
Tuscumbia to teach a child who was both deaf and blind. Indeed,
my friends and relatives sometimes doubted whether I could be
taught. My mother's only ray of hope came from Dickens's
"American Notes." She had read his account of Laura Bridgman, and
remembered vaguely that she was deaf and blind, yet had been
educated. But she also remembered with a hopeless pang that Dr.
Howe, who had discovered the way to teach the deaf and blind, had