personality mark twain has said that the two most iing characters of the eenth tury are napoleon and helen keller. the admiration with which the world has regarded her is more than justified by what she has done. no one tell any great truth about her which has not already been written, and all that i do is to give a few more facts about miss kellers work and add a little to what is known of her personality.
miss keller is tall and strongly built, and has always had good health. she seems to be more nervous than she really is, because she expresses more with her hands than do most english-speaking people. one reason for this habit of gesture is that her hands have been so long her instruments of unication that they have taken to themselves the quick shiftings of the eye, and express some of the things that we say in a glance. all deaf people naturally gesticulate. indeed, at oime it was believed that the best way for them to unicate was through systematized gestures, the sign language ied by the abbe de lepee.
when miss keller speaks, her face is animated and expresses all the modes of her thought--the expressions that make the features eloquent and give speech half its meaning. oher hand she does not know anothers expression. when she is talking with an intimate friend, however, her hand goes quickly to her friends face to see, as she says, "the twist of the mouth." in this way she is able to get the meaning of those half sentences which we plete unsciously from the tone of the voice or the twinkle of the eye.
her memory of people is remarkable. she remembers the grasp of fingers she has held before, all the characteristic tightening of the muscles that makes one persons handshake different from that of another.
the trait most characteristic, perhaps, of miss keller (and also of miss sullivan) is humour. skill in the use of words and her habit of playing with them make her ready with mots and epigrams.
some one asked her if she liked to study.
"yes," she replied, "but i like to play also, and i feel sometimes as if i were a music box with all the play shut up inside me.”
whe dr. furness, the shakespearean scholar, he warned her not to let the college professors tell her too many assumed facts about the life of shakespeare; all we know, he said, is that shakespeare was baptized, married, and died.
"well," she replied, "he seems to have done all the essential things.”
once a friend who was learning
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