routine of the school he had worked and striven to obtain knowledge, to find help for himself and others. He was a man of small stature and of slender build, with plentiful dark hair on head and face. He wore darkened spectacles, which covered the sightless eyes. His nose was large and well formed, and the mouth fairly good. All the features were marked by extreme mobility, a sensitive tremulousness often seen in the blind. It is as if they did their thinking outside. Bessie had this same tremulous mobility of feature; her soul fluttered as it were about a thought, and you saw hope, apprehension, joy, fear, or dismay when it was first presented to her.

Levy was a man of eager intelligence and generous heart. He earnestly desired the amelioration of the condition of the blind. Their disabilities had pressed upon him from his youth upwards, and upon all around him.

Living in an institution, and able to measure himself by no higher standard than that which it offered, he had not, however, realised the actual limitations of blindness. It is doubtful whether he ever did realise them. He would, therefore, have been an unsafe guide, but he was an excellent follower. He would have resented interference from those whom he called "the sighted," but he submitted to the blind lady; her nurture, training, and delicate sense of the fitness of things gave her a strong hold over him. He accepted her judgment when it was opposed to his own will, and faithfully carried out her views and wishes.

During this first interview in Queen Anne Street he told her of the various institutions in Great Britain and their work, and especially of the work done in London. At her request he investigated carefully, and obtained dates, facts, and figures that were reliable. Bessie found that the institutions for the blind provided instruction for the young, and for them only. Statistics showed, however, that by far the greater number of blind persons lose their sight as adults, from such causes as fever, smallpox, and accidental injury. They lose sight when others are dependent upon them, and when blindness means either the life of a beggar or life in the workhouse. And again she learnt that the existing institutions dismiss young men and women who have been fairly educated and taught a trade, on the assumption that, as adults, they can practise their trade and earn a living. This conjecture tells cruelly upon the blind. They leave many of the institutions with an adequate stock of clothes, and either with tools or with money to purchase tools; and then begins a hopeless struggle. Private friends diminish in numbers, and are gradually lost. The blind men and women cannot go about from place to place in search of work, cannot work without special contrivances, which are not to be found in ordinary workshops, and have no market for their goods if they work at home.

But do blind people wish to work, or would they not rather beg? asked many to whom Bessie spoke on this subject. To this she replied that she

For some

did not know; must try to find this out. months, at her request, Levy went into the streets and accosted every blind beggar whom he met, asking him or her to tell the story of life to a blind man. "Which would you rather do, work or beg?" he would ask when the speaker had finished. And in almost every case the answer was "Work." "Why, I'd rather work, but how can I get work; or, if I get it, how can I do it? And where can I sell it, if I work at home without orders?"

These were the difficulties that experience brought to light, and after many months of close and patient investigation, Bessie at length saw a way open before her. "Don't work yourself to

death," a friend said to her at this time. "Work to death," she said, with a happy laugh; "I am working to life."

She saw that some one must come forward to befriend the blind poor, some one who could supply material, give employment, or dispose of the articles manufactured.

Why should she not do this?

Her parents warmly approved of the course she proposed to take, and brothers, sisters, friends encouraged her. They saw that it would bring occupation and interest, which she sorely needed. They could not foresee how the little rill was to widen into a broad stream, and what far-reaching results it would have.

In May 1854 "Bessie's scheme" was started. Seven blind men were employed at their own

homes, material was purchased for and supplied to them at cost price; the articles manufactured were to be disposed of on their account, and they were to receive the full selling price, minus the cost of material.

A cellar was rented in New Turnstile, Holborn, at the cost of eighteen pence a week, and Levy was engaged as manager, with a salary of half a crown a week, and a percentage upon the sales. The cellar was to be a store-room for materials and goods, and as the basket-makers could not bleach their baskets at home, a binn was fixed so that this part of the work could be done in the cellar. Levy recommended a young man named Farrow to put up the bleaching binn. Farrow had lost his sight at eleven years old in consequence of a gun accident. He had been educated in the St. John's Wood School, was a very good carpenter and cabinetmaker, and a man who could readily turn his hand to anything. But like many others who had left the school, he was without work or prospect of work.

He fixed the bleaching binn and arranged the cellar as a store-room without any assistance, and from 1854 to the present time he has been employed by the institution which sprang from that small dark cellar in Holborn.

Levy's theory was that no man with sight should interfere with the blind; that an opportunity ought to be afforded them of showing that their work is thorough and complete, and that they can stand alone. It may, at that time, have

been necessary to take such a step in order to convince the general public that blind men and women could do anything at all, but the theory involves a limitation which is to be regretted.

Bessie's education, experience, and sympathy would naturally lead her to try to restore the blind to their place and their work in the world, to ameliorate their condition but not to alienate them, not to separate them from home and companions. Her own happy youth, her work in the schoolroom at Oxford, her enjoyment of the home at Chichester, all tended to prevent her from being drawn into the current with enthusiasts who looked upon the blind, less as afflicted, than as persecuted and oppressed. She had gradually learnt that blindness is a limitation which the most loving and tender care cannot entirely remove. To be blind, to be a woman, both imply considerable restrictions: but Bessie was not predisposed to consider one state any more the fault of society than the other. She would labour to remove the disabilities of either condition, but she always recognised that they were inherent, and did not arise from persecution or ill-will.

It is necessary to say so much at this time, because we shall see that in many points Bessie did yield to the judgment of one who took an extreme view; who, himself educated in an institution, surrounded only by blind people, often of a very feeble capacity, had learned to look upon. himself more as a member of an oppressed and persecuted race than as an afflicted man. Levy wished