he gave her detached labels bearing the same words. After a while, she learned to attach the proper labels to the objects. The next step was to give her individual letters and have her spell out words. She made progress, but it was slow going, and oddly disappointing: “The process,” said Howe, “[was] mechanical, and the success about as great as teaching a very knowing dog a variety of tricks.”

When the breakthrough finally came, it came suddenly: “She perceived that here was a way by which she could make herself up a sign of anything that was in her own mind, and show it to another mind; and at once her countenance lighted up with a human expression: it was no longer a dog or parrot: it was an immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other spirits!”

That moment was the signal triumph of Howe’s career. Knowing, now, that a true intelligence stirred behind Laura’s dead eyes, he was elated to discover the breadth of her curiosity. She became fascinated by the concept of colorsshe developed a curious aversion to red—and was intrigued by geography, though she occasionally gave way to despair as she began to grasp how big and various a place the world was. Once, using what she called “finger talking,” she asked her instructor, “Are you not very tired of living so many years?” Eventually she grew sophisticated enough to be an ardent Free Soil advocate.

Within two years of her arrival at the school, she began her first letter: “Laura will write letter to mother. …” She learned to knit, crochet, and sew, and developed a lively and affectionate personality that charmed the visitors who came to see her.

They came in the hundreds, for by this time Laura and her mentor had become famous. Howe had published reports on her progress from the beginning, and the word had spread throughout Europe and America. Not only did Laura represent an extraordinary pedagogical achievement, she also stood for something her era took very seriously indeed—the invincibility of the human spirit. “The good little girl,” Thomas Carlyle wrote Howe from England, “one loves her to the very heart.… That little question of hers, ‘Do horses sit up late?’ stirs us to laughter, to tears … and probably to as kind a mood as human speech alone can awaken in a human heart.”

Laura came to the end of her formal education when she was twenty, but she stayed at the Perkins Institution for the rest of her life. She knitted, made beds, cleaned, and occasionally taught sewing—very strictly—to the pupils. She became a busy correspondent, and in her later years wrote poetrysimple, devout verse filled with images of darkness and light:

Joy is a blazing flame, Darkness is frosty. A good sleep is a white curtain,

A bad sleep is a black curtain.

She died of pneumonia at the age of sixty. “It has been better for her generation,” Howe had said, “that she lived in it.” And it has been better for the generations that followed. When Anne Sullivan, herself a graduate of the Perkins Institution, undertook to educate a wild little girl named Helen Keller, she set out knowing that the road ahead had been traveled before.