248 LAURA BRIDGMAN. her fondly, all doubt suddenly disappeared from the child's countenance ; and, her face beaming with joy, she yielded to her mother's embraces. One of her visitors, when she was twelve years of age, was Charles Dickens, who was profoundly interested in her. " Her face," he says, " was radiant with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands, was bound about her head, whose intellectual capacity and development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline and its broad, open brow ; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and simplicity ; the work she had knitted lay beside her ; her writing-book was on the desk she leaned upon. . . . Like other inmates of that house, she had a green ribbon bound around her eyelids. A doll she had dressed lay near her upon the ground. I took it up, and saw that she had made a green fillet, such as she wore herself, and fastened it about its minute eyes. . . . My hand she rejected at once, as she does that of any man who is a stranger to her. But she retained my wife's with evident pleasure, kissing her, and examined her dress with a girl's curiosity and interest." It was at this period that Dr. Howe commissioned Miss Sophie A. Peabody of Salem, afterward the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, to model the bust of Laura in clay, which may still be seen in the Asylum at Boston. The artist was then engaged to Hawthorne, and the money ($150) that she received for the work, went into a fund which she had already begun to set apart for her wedding trousseau. Laura herself watched the progress of the clay model with keen interest, perusing its features with delicate, sensitive fingers, clapping her little hands with delight, and gleefully speaking of the bust as her " white baby.'
