The Story of My Life

The summer and winter following the “Frost King” incident I spent with my family in Alabama.  I recall with delight that home-going.  Everything had budded and blossomed.  I was happy.  “The Frost King” was forgotten.

When the ground was strewn with the crimson and golden leaves of autumn, and the musk-scented grapes that covered the arbour at the end of the garden were turning golden brown in the sunshine, I began to write a sketch of my life—­a year after I had written “The Frost King.”

I was still excessively scrupulous about everything I wrote.  The thought that what I wrote might not be absolutely my own tormented me.  No one knew of these fears except my teacher.  A strange sensitiveness prevented me from referring to the “Frost King”; and often when an idea flashed out in the course of conversation I would spell softly to her, “I am not sure it is mine.”  At other times, in the midst of a paragraph I was writing, I said to myself, “Suppose it should be found that all this was written by some one long ago!” An impish fear clutched my hand, so that I could not write any more that day.  And even now I sometimes feel the same uneasiness and disquietude.  Miss Sullivan consoled and helped me in every way she could think of; but the terrible experience I had passed through left a lasting impression on my mind, the significance of which I am only just beginning to understand.  It was with the hope of restoring my self-confidence that she persuaded me to write for the Youth’s Companion a brief account of my life.  I was then twelve years old.  As I look back on my struggle to write that little story, it seems to me that I must have had a prophetic vision of the good that would come of the undertaking, or I should surely have failed.

I wrote timidly, fearfully, but resolutely, urged on by my teacher, who knew that if I persevered, I should find my mental foothold again and get a grip on my faculties.  Up to the time of the “Frost King” episode, I had lived the unconscious life of a little child; now my thoughts were turned inward, and I beheld things invisible.  Gradually I emerged from the penumbra of that experience with a mind made clearer by trial and with a truer knowledge of life.

The chief events of the year 1893 were my trip to Washington during the inauguration of President Cleveland, and visits to Niagara and the World’s Fair.  Under such circumstances my studies were constantly interrupted and often put aside for many weeks, so that it is impossible for me to give a connected account of them.

We went to Niagara in March, 1893.  It is difficult to describe my emotions when I stood on the point which overhangs the American Falls and felt the air vibrate and the earth tremble.

It seems strange to many people that I should be impressed by the wonders and beauties of Niagara.  They are always asking:  “What does this beauty or that music mean to you?  You cannot see the waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar.  What do they mean to you?” In the most evident sense they mean everything.  I cannot fathom or define their meaning any more than I can fathom or define love or religion or goodness.

During the summer of 1893, Miss Sullivan and I visited the World’s Fair with Dr. Alexander Graham Bell.  I recall with unmixed delight those days when a thousand childish fancies became beautiful realities.  Every day in imagination I made a trip round the world, and I saw many wonders from the uttermost parts of the earth—­marvels of invention, treasuries of industry and skill and all the activities of human life actually passed under my finger tips.

I liked to visit the Midway Plaisance.  It seemed like the “Arabian Nights,” it was crammed so full of novelty and interest.  Here was the India of my books in the curious bazaar with its Shivas and elephant-gods; there was the land of the Pyramids concentrated in a model Cairo with its mosques and its long processions of camels; yonder were the lagoons of Venice, where we sailed every evening when the city and the fountains were illuminated.  I also went on board a Viking ship which lay a short distance from the little craft.  I had been on a man-of-war before, in Boston, and it interested me to see, on this Viking ship, how the seaman was once all in all—­how he sailed and took storm and calm alike with undaunted heart, and gave chase to whosoever reechoed his cry, “We are of the sea!” and fought with brains and sinews, self-reliant, self-sufficient, instead of being thrust into the background by unintelligent machinery, as Jack is to-day.  So it always is—­“man only is interesting to man.”

At a little distance from this ship there was a model of the Santa Maria, which I also examined.  The captain showed me Columbus’s cabin and the desk with an hour-glass on it.  This small instrument impressed me most because it made me think how weary the heroic navigator must have felt as he saw the sand dropping grain by grain while desperate men were plotting against his life.

Mr. Higinbotham, President of the World’s Fair, kindly gave me permission to touch the exhibits, and with an eagerness as insatiable as that with which Pizarro seized the treasures of Peru, I took in the glories of the Fair with my fingers.  It was a sort of tangible kaleidoscope, this white city of the West.  Everything fascinated me, especially the French bronzes.  They were so lifelike, I thought they were angel visions which the artist had caught and bound in earthly forms.

At the Cape of Good Hope exhibit, I learned much about the processes of mining diamonds.  Whenever it was possible, I touched the machinery while it was in motion, so as to get a clearer idea how the stones were weighed, cut, and polished.  I searched in the washings for a diamond and found it myself—­the only true diamond, they said, that was ever found in the United States.

Dr. Bell went everywhere with us and in his own delightful way described to me the objects of greatest interest.  In the electrical building we examined the telephones, autophones, phonographs, and other inventions, and he made me understand how it is possible to send a message on wires that mock space and outrun time, and, like Prometheus, to draw fire from the sky.  We also visited the anthropological department, and I was much interested in the relics of ancient Mexico, in the rude stone implements that are so often the only record of an age—­the simple monuments of nature’s unlettered children (so I thought as I fingered them) that seem bound to last while the memorials of kings and sages crumble in dust away—­and in the Egyptian mummies, which I shrank from touching.  From these relics I learned more about the progress of man than I have heard or read since.

All these experiences added a great many new terms to my vocabulary, and in the three weeks I spent at the Fair I took a long leap from the little child’s interest in fairy tales and toys to the appreciation of the real and the earnest in the workaday world.