LAURA BRIDGMAN. 245 During those 3 T ears her great friend and benefactor was in training in the city of Boston. Dr. S. G. Howe, after studying medicine, was so powerfully wrought upon by that movement for the independence of Greece in which Lord Byron spent the last months of his life, that he went to Greece, where he served as a surgeon in the patriot army, and in other capacities for five years. Afterwards he was in the Polish movement of 1831, which led to his imprisonment in Prussia for six weeks. At thirty-two, we find him President of the Perkins Institution for the Blind in South Boston, in the founding of which he had taken an active part. In 1837, when he had had five years' experience in teaching the blind, he heard of Laura Bridgman, and went to Hanover to visit her, intending, if her parents would consent, to bring her to the Institution, to see if it were possible to give her some instruction. " I found her," he once wrote, " with a well-formed figure, a strongly marked, nervous-sanguine temperament, a large and beautifully shaped head, and her whole sys- tem in healthy action." With the cheerful consent of her parents, she was transferred to the Institution in the fall of 1837, when she was eight years of age. For several days after enter- ing the Institution she seemed much puzzled with the novelty of the objects by which she was surrounded, and the doctor made no attempt to instruct her for two weeks, when she had become pretty familiar with her new abode and acquainted with its inmates. He began her instruction in this way : He took a com- mon spoon and key, and pasted upon each a label upon which its name was printed in raised letters. These objects she felt very carefully, and was not long in dis- covering the difference in the two words. A blind child makes a discovery of that kind in an instant, owing to the
