confirmed by a distinguished lawyer; another I had from the Chief of the United States Reclamation Service; in another case I saw the books. And there were other tales, wholly incredible, yet defended against my protest by a keen and persuasive land agent with the exultant paradox: "The truth is so wonderful that it takes a whopper of a lie to express it!"

Some men would starve in a bakeshop, as the saying goes; and it takes industry and intelligence to wrest rich. profits even from these miraculous acres. But certainly there are few other places where the farmer so surely reaps as he sows and works. Sunshine is eternal; winter is mild; water is no longer the capricious gift of the clouds, and comes when it is needed. The reward, except for the small changes of the fruit market, depends on nothing but a man's own efforts its limit seems actually to lie within the impossible land of dreams. "And to think," drawled a lank tenderfoot, "that that there land has been lyin' outdoors and unteched ever sence Adam was a yearlin'."

The old West of cowboy and miner has all but passed away. The new West in the North, in the mass a great fraternity of farmers, has caught its spirit and is diffusing its inspiration. The call to its life is like a conversion to religion, and no convert is ever lost, though temptations of hardship and misfortune abound. Difference in soil and crops and markets may force the farmer through repeated failure to learn his trade anew. He may find that the world of the West is primitively based on the simplest wants, and that it is very rough and crude; but wherever a man may be native-Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Canada -he has found a hearty home, and universally he is emphatic in his declaration of preference. He delights to tell you, until you are weary of the repeti

tion: "I could never live in the East again."

The Northwest is so new that at times it is unconscious of joint human interests, the social and political things that are created when men live together. It is so new that its life will often seem formless and disordered. Yet its character is sharply drawn beyond mistaking. In accusation you may truly say that it is materialistic, devoid of illusions, selfassertive, and mad for a gamble. Its bias is bluffly contemptuous. It bitterly hates a do-nothing philosopher, and it is brutally intolerant of those who are in any wise dependent on luxuries. Its prejudice often looks upon the East as a small world of small men-a population of bloodless clerks, whom it suspects of a cheating wit as a Breton suspects a Norman. But its faults are all of the surface, and it is child-honest, sane, healthy, and charitable. It judges men not on their past but on their pres

ent.

In

Its patriotism is intense; its very materialism ideal. In enthusiasm and faith and generous passions the Northwestern farmers are like college boys. Good-humored, hospitable, brave, uncomplaining, they form a brotherhood of all men who are willing to work. They hold nothing impossible; they are eager at their tasks-lightning quick in the solution of strange problems. the greatest and swiftest battle ever fought with wild nature they are turning a boundless desert into a garden. Working like Titans, they are building railways and great cities. For the Northwest they have made this the age of heroic industry, and because of them in that spacious and free-breathing land the most prosaic progress becomes of thrilling and dramatic importance; and every step gained-that marked and striking thing-is an advance in the verging drift of our Republic toward the North and toward a yet further West.

I

T will be twenty years since I published in the magazine`called Lenda-Hand Miss Annie Sullivan's first report of what I called then the miracle of her first year with Helen Keller. The names of these two ladies are so closely associated that you cannot think of one without thinking of the other. In any study of the science of education from our time forward both names must be studied together; and if there is any science of education, as I think there is, the study of their united life is most important. I think I have said in The Outlook before now what I have certainly said in print a hundred times, that no other treatise on education will give to a conscientious student so much light as to the principles of education as the appendix of Miss Sullivan to the "Life of Miss Keller." That appendix goes quite in detail into the methods or processes by which Miss Sullivan was able to lead her pupil from step to step. Of the result of that leading we now have twenty years of experience and suggestion. Those twenty years have thus given us a great deal of new knowledge of what language is, of what memory is, of some of the other processes of thought. It seems to me that those years have silenced forever some of the old saws or pretended postulates in education. It is quite certain that this record of those years is of use, not only for people who have no sight and no hearing, but for all of us.

It proves, for example, that the loss so terrible of sight and sound is not without compensation. At the age of seven years, between the second day of March, 1887, to the first day of May, 1887, Helen had learned to talk. Her vocabulary was small, but she knew how to use it. She talked with her fingers on the palm of her teacher's hand. On May Day she came to Miss Sullivan and said, "Give Helen key: open door." "I then taught her the word will," says Miss Sullivan, "and she learned at once to

say, 'Give Helen key and Helen will open door.' She had already learned what is, it seems, the first germ of Language, that everything has a name. She had also learned the use and value of verbs, and on May Day she finds out what tenses are. The same summer, after four months of study, she wrote with her own pencil a letter to her mother which was perfectly legible. It begins, "Helen will write mother letter. Papa did give Helen medicine. Mildred will sit in swing," and so on for twenty short lines. Two months after she wrote to the blind girls at the Boston Asylum the letter, more legible than the average letter which I receive in my daily correspondence (and this means wholly legible), which begins, "Helen will write little blind girls a letter. Helen and Teacher will come to see little blind girls. Helen and Teacher will go in steam cars to Boston."

My attention was called very early to what still seems to me the interesting fact that in one of these early letters Helen wrote the word chrysanthemum with perfect accuracy. Miss Sullivan says that it sometimes seems as if she took in a long word more easily than a short one. Not long since I asked them about this, and was told, in reply, that Miss Sullivan could not recall any occasion-in almost twenty years, observe— when Helen had forgotten the spelling of any word that she had learned to spell.

I have gone out of my way to state this fact because it shows what class of compensations I allude to when I say that such difficulties as she has have their compensations. There is no mother who reads these lines whose first-born child ever learned four hundred words in the four months which followed the papa and mamma of the beginning; and there is no reader of these lines, excepting Miss Keller, who will read them, who in eighteen years has not mistaken the spelling of a word which she has learned. Such is a single instance of what I call the compensations of a life which, if we