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Darkness cannot shut me in again. I have had a glimpse of the shore, and can now live by the hope of reaching it.

My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to coöperate with the good, that it may prevail.

I believe we should so act that we may draw nearer and more near the age when no man shall live at his ease while another suffers.

In the midst of my perplexity I read an essay of Stevenson which made me feel as if I had been "outing" in the sunshine, instead of losing heart over a difficult task. I tried again with new courage and succeeded almost before I knew it.

But during the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out.

But afterward, when I was restored to my human heritage, Mildred and I grew into each other's hearts, so that we were content to go hand-in-hand wherever caprice led us, although she could not understand my finger language, nor I her childish prattle.

Some one took it, and I was caught up and held close in the arms of her who had come to reveal all things to me, and, more than all things else, to love me.

All the best of me belongs to her--there is not a talent, or an aspiration or a joy in me that has not been awakened by her loving touch.

Debarred from the great highways of knowledge, I was compelled to make the journey across country by unfrequented roads--that was all; and I knew that in college there were many bypaths where I could touch hands with girls who were thinking, loving and struggling like me.

Their thoughtfulness has been more of a help and encouragement to me than they can ever know.

I loved "Little Women" because it gave me a sense of kinship with girls and boys who could see and hear.

Then comes hope with a smile and whispers, "There is joy in self-forgetfulness." So I try to make the light in others' eyes my sun, the music in others' ears my symphony, the smile on others' lips my happiness.

Those are red-letter days in our lives when we meet people who thrill us like a fine poem, people whose handshake is brimful of unspoken sympathy, and whose sweet, rich natures impart to our eager, impatient spirits a wonderful restfulness which, in its essence, is divine.

Now I rejoice in the consciousness that I can think, act and attain heaven.

I remember an hour when I was discouraged and ready to falter. For days I had been pegging away at a task which refused to get itself accomplished.

There, too, after a fit of temper, I went to find comfort and to hide my hot face in the cool leaves and grass.

What a joy it is to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet once more, to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks where I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling notes, or to clamber over a stone wall into green fields that tumble and roll and climb in riotous gladness!