might have said “Like a flame of fire.”  I once asked a blind boy, who had never seen light, if he could imagine a house on fire and how he supposed it would look.  He answered, “If it was a big fire it would look like a thousand trumpets all blowing in a different key.”  I then asked him what a picture is like.  “Like anything in shape you may wish to paint,” he said, “but in color (if it is a fine picture) like one of Mozart’s grand symphonies.”  I have many times asked my blind lady friends how they knew in what way to arrange their colors so as to make their fancy work look tasty and attractive.  How they knew what colors blended and what were discordant, and I have often received this answer:  “By associating the names of the seven primary colors with the seven sounds of the diatonic scale, placing red as No. 1 or key note, orange next, yellow next, then green, and so on to violet.  Thus red will not blend with orange, being the first and second of the scale, but red and yellow harmonize better, being third in the scale, red and green still better, and so on to red and deep violet, which are sevenths in the scale and do not harmonize.  Thus we get the tetrachord red, yellow, blue and violet, which may be represented by the flat seventh of the chord C.”  But I leave this theory for some one to elaborate or refute, who has seen color, and return to my institution life.

The ear and voice are also trained at these schools for the blind, and music is made one of the chief arts.  Piano tuning is also taught in a practical way.  If this business is not taught in all the institutions, it ought to be, for it comes fairly within the scope of our capabilities.  And I will here say for the benefit of my brothers in the dark that I have been very successful as a piano tuner, and the business is a practical one for the blind.  Any one with a good ear may learn to tune well, but no one should undertake to repair so delicate a piece of machinery as a piano action without long experience, mechanical ingenuity, great caution and good judgment, having had no opportunity to acquire the requisite skill.

It was not my intention at the outset to write a sketch of my own life, but to demonstrate by my own experience that the inferior senses may be made to perform many of the offices of sight.  The eyes have some functions, however, which the ears and fingers cannot perform.

For example, if a piece of silk or woolen goods be handed me for examination the nerves of my fingers will tell me whether it is fine or coarse, whether it has a harsh or soft texture, whether it is highly finished or rough and uneven, but they bring me no intelligence of color.

I may pronounce the goods beautiful, because I find in it certain qualities that address themselves to my taste, but it is not beauty addressed to the eye.  Light and color, to one who has never seen, is as inconceivable as music to the deaf.  We may get some faint idea of what light is as a medium of communication, or why color pleases the eye as qualities of texture please the touch, but the conception is vague and unsatisfactory.