I am an Essex band on this occasion, and I am going to get through as well as inexperience and good intentions will enable me.  I have got all the documents here necessary to instruct you in the objects and intentions of this meeting and also of the association which has called the meeting.  But they are too voluminous.  I could not pack those statistics into my head, and I had to give it up.  I shall have to just reduce all that mass of statistics to a few salient facts.  There are too many statistics and figures for me.  I never could do anything with figures, never had any talent for mathematics, never accomplished anything in my efforts at that rugged study, and to-day the only mathematics I know is multiplication, and the minute I get away up in that, as soon as I reach nine times seven—­

[Mr. Clemens lapsed into deep thought for a moment.  He was trying to figure out nine times seven, but it was a hopeless task, and he turned to St. Clair McKelway, who sat near him.  Mr. McKelway whispered the answer, and the speaker resumed:]

I’ve got it now.  It’s eighty-four.  Well, I can get that far all right with a little hesitation.  After that I am uncertain, and I can’t manage a statistic.

“This association for the—­”

[Mr. Clemens was in another dilemma.  Again he was obliged to turn to Mr. McKelway.]

Oh yes, for promoting the interests of the blind.  It’s a long name.  If I could I would write it out for you and let you take it home and study it, but I don’t know how to spell it.  And Mr. Carnegie is down in Virginia somewhere.  Well, anyway, the object of that association which has been recently organized, five months ago, in fact, is in the hands of very, very energetic, intelligent, and capable people, and they will push it to success very surely, and all the more surely if you will give them a little of your assistance out of your pockets.

The intention, the purpose, is to search out all the blind and find work for them to do so that they may earn, their own bread.  Now it is dismal enough to be blind—­it is dreary, dreary life at best, but it can be largely ameliorated by finding something for these poor blind people to do with their hands.  The time passes so heavily that it is never day or night with them, it is always night, and when they have to sit with folded hands and with nothing to do to amuse or entertain or employ their minds, it is drearier and drearier.

And then the knowledge they have that they must subsist on charity, and so often reluctant charity, it would renew their lives if they could have something to do with their hands and pass their time and at the same time earn their bread, and know the sweetness of the bread which is the result of the labor of one’s own hands.  They need that cheer and pleasure.  It is the only way you can turn their night into day, to give them happy hearts, the only thing you can put in the place of the blessed sun.  That you can do in the way I speak of.