To use the musical measure of poetic prose as rendered by Mr. Artman, one of the most renowned blind authors—­“There is a world to which night brings no gloom, no sadness, no impediments; fills no yawning chasm and hides from the traveler no pitfall.  It is the world of sound.  Silence is its night, the only darkness of which the blind have any knowledge.  In it every attribute of Nature has a voice; the beautiful, the grand, the sublime, have each a language, and to me, whose heart is in tune, every sound has a peculiar significance.  Sounds fill the soul, while light fills the eye only.  ‘In the varied strains of warbling melody,’ as it winds in its graceful meanderings to the deep recesses of his soul, or of the rich and boundless harmony, as it swells and rolls its pompous tide around him, he finds a solace and a compensation for the absent joys of sight.”

And so I close with a blessing upon the members of my class, and may the God of light and love illumine their paths, and glorify their lives, is my earnest, heartfelt prayer.

CHAPTER XXIV.

    “The prayer of Ajax was for light;
    Through all that dark and desperate fight,
    The blackness of that noonday night,
    He asked but the return of sight,
    To see his foeman’s face.

    “Let our unceasing, earnest prayer
    Be, too, for light—­for strength to bear
    Our portion of the weight of care,
    That crushes into dumb despair
    One half the human race.”

From Baltimore I went to Westminster, Maryland, to visit my cousin, Charles Henniman, and my stay there was characterized by all the joy of sweet reunion and eager acceptance of hospitalities so lavishly bestowed.  It was with mingled emotions of pleasure and pain I greeted my old friend, Carrie Fringer.  In person she was of a peculiar type of beauty, a face regular in features as a Madonna, beaming with the soft, love-light of rare, sweet eyes, in whose depths were imprisoned not only an intense brightness, but the still deeper glow of a soul of love and truth.  Curls of soft brown hair fell upon her symmetrical shoulders and softened the face they framed into an almost spiritual sweetness.  From an affliction in her childhood she had almost ever since been unable to walk, and indeed none of the beautiful limbs were available for voluntary motion.  Thus deprived of more than half of life’s joy, its sweet activity, many would have lapsed into a morbid, nervous condition, over which we might justly have thrown the mantle of charity, but this dear friend was so lovely and chastened in her affliction, that she seemed almost a Deity in her attributes of tender love and patient self-abnegation, united to a heroic endurance of pain with which she was daily, hourly and momently tortured.  Surely

    “The good are better made by ill,
    As odors crushed are sweeter still.”