WONDERS BLIND FOLK CAN DO.

Otago Witness, Issue 2263, 15 July 1897, Page 54

WONDERS BLIND FOLK CAN DO.

They Must be Seen to be Believed. A sturdy, thick-set frame, arms on which the swelling muscles stand out in balls — in fact, as finely built and powerful a young fellow as you could wish to see as he doeß a series of half-arm and straight-arm balances on the parallel bars. " Nothing very extraordinary in that," you will say. Yes, bnt look again. The poor boy is stone-blind, as he has been since fever destroyed bis sight at five years of age. So, too, are all the rest of these seven or eight performers in the gymnasium. Shut your eyes and keep them tightly shut whilst yon try to do a circle on the horizontal or a swing On the trapeze. That may help you to realise how marvellous are the performances of these blind boys. At the Southwark School for tha Blind and other similar places, blind boys and girls learn to do many things that must be seen to be believed. They play cricket with a ball attached to a long string, and football with a bell inside the ball. At the Norwood Institute some of the pupils eDJoy bicycling, each atriDg of three being guided by a sigl t d rider. , Cards blind people delight in. Cribbage

and even whist are favourite games. The cards are easily distinguished by means of an ingenious littld device in blind type on the back of each. A. S., for instance, stands for the ace of spades ; 7H. for the seven of hearts, and so on. Of oourse the cards are called as they are played. Draughts and cbess men are easily adapted for blind players by a little knob on the top of each black piece ; and dominoes naturally lend themselves to the amusement of sightless persons. Perhaps what most strikes one in being shown over the Blind School at Southwark is the ease with which the inmates find their way about, running up and down stairs and going in and out of narrow passages and doorways with the greatest facility. They don't stretch out their hands in front of themselves or walk uncertainly, yet they seem never to run into one another or hurt themselves against walls or corners. Selfreliance is, indeed, the keynote of blind education. Blind children's memories might be envied by ordinary boys and girls. Many of them can repeat whole pages of poetry after bearing them read two or three times only. They learn to read, of course, with raised type — not nowadays with the ordinary letters, but with what is called Braille type ; and write, not with pen and ink, bub on a kind of pocket type-writer or cyclostyle. Some take to the ordinary type-writer, and one boy stone-blind can actually do 60 words a : minute on a machine that differs from the ! ordinary only in the* letters of the keyboard being slightly in relief. Music is the great joy and employment of the blind. The writer heard an orchestra of 20 performers playing really difficult pieces in perfect time and tune. They learn by touch from music written in relief. One Southwark boy has taken his degree in the Royal College of Organists. Another who has taken to piano-tuning as a means of livelihood has a numerous clientele, and finds his way about all over London alone. It is quite marvellous to watch the deftness of the blind girls who make ropes. Their fingers fly like lightning as they twist

the tough fibres. And such dainty baskets 1 , too, they make, with never a mistake in plaiting or finishing. Blind meu and boys are at work making mats on looms in a room which, though airy, is underground, and bo dark that the writer kept stumbling over the bundles of coil and other raw material on the floor. It was positively uncanny to hear the sounds of busy industry in the thick gloom. All the mate used by the London School Board are turned cut in this and an adjoining room. Brush- making isn't the easiest work in the world even for persons with sight. Delicate bunches of fibre and bristles have to be carefully sorted, trimmed, inserted in the perforated backs, and tied in. £1400 worth of brashes are turned out each year by blind labour in Southwark alone. In tha shop is a timekeeper, blind like the rest of them. On asking him the time he pulled out his watch and, delicately touching it with a finger-tip, said in an instant, " Sixteen minutes past 4." The writer tried the experiment himself with his eyes shut, and only succeeded in moving the hour hand out of its proper place. To oonclude, hers is an instance of tha marvellous instinct of locality possessed by some blind people. A miner bad been charitably kept on in a Cornish tin mine after the accident which destroyed his sight, A sudden iorash of water flooded a large part; of the workings, and this blind old man saved the lives of 15 of his fellow- workers by leading them through old, and by them unknown, passages to the light of day.