For this school began with a blind man. Five years ago, near the banks of the Severn, a cart containing vitriol was overturned; and of four people who were there, only two were left alive, and one of these was blind. Childless and blind, this man had to begin life again—to learn to live in darkness, and in darkness to work for others. For as soon as he had learned to grope his way, he learned to read in the books provided for the blind, and went from village to village to find other blind persons, and teach them how to read also. Then a noble-hearted woman came forward to help him, and founded the school; where blind children are trained to work as well as read, and blind men and women come every day to be taught trades. These latter come daily to the school, groping their way along the path that had been so tedious to our impatience; and learn to work, and also to read, helped sometimes by the teachers, sometimes by the blind man: who also still goes as before, from village to village, teaching and comforting those in the same straits as himself.
We were guided through a back way, intricate and uneven, where our blind guide warned us carefully of every step—though he said the children ran about everywhere and never fell—till we went through the school and entered his little house alongside, and found ourselves in a bright little parlour upstairs, full of books, and tastefully furnished, with a woman’s taste; for the woman who survived the accident which left her childless and crippled, had still the sight of one eye. There was an harmonium in the room, and one of the children came to play it. He was called Abraham; but this old name belonged to an intelligent, bright-faced English lad of twelve, well dressed and handsome but for his sad dim eyes. He is the son of a well-to-do farmer, and in education and intelligence far removed from some of his companions. He handled the harmonium with his small, delicate fingers as only a real musician can, and while the music lasted I nearly forgot all the sadness of the scene, and the hopeless life of the musician and the other children, who, one by one, guided by the sound, crept up the narrow stairs and came noiselessly into the room, and stood listening spell-bound till he finished. “And now, Lizzie, play,” said some one, and a girl came to the harmonium. She knew far less of music than Abraham, and had as yet little execution, but the sweet, true feeling which she gave to the old hymn tunes stirred the heart and brought tears to my eyes. “And would you like to hear us sing the hymn we sang when she was buried?” they asked. For their benefactress and friend, the woman whose untiring energy had begun and carried on this work among them, rousing sympathy for them among her townspeople, and begging for them when her own means were insufficient, died a few weeks ago, and the children of the school had seen her laid in the churchyard. The harmonium was hushed, Lizzie only struck the keynote, and they all sang, as they had all sung at the grave in the cold February morning when they saw her lowered into the cold earth,