Never Seen a Train.

Now I am going to tell you about a number of children I met in Auckland who have never seen a train.

Can you guess who they are? Yes, the children in the Institute for the Blind. The school-bell clangs, and in from the swings and the see-saws in the playground they come. They scarcely need to feel their way about as they are so used to the run of the buildings, and they laugh and chatter away to one another. In addition to the usual school routine they learn typewriting, which they think is good fun. On the mantelpiece are stuffed rabbits and birds, so that they can feel what animals and birds are like. The blind children learn by touch, and they knit and make many useful articles from various materials. They love singing, and some of them play the piano and violin very well. Are they downhearted? Not a bit. Many of them do not know what it is to have sight, and therefore do not miss it. They join in all the fun that's going, and have their own tea parties, go for walks, and in the warmer weather they have picnics, go swimming, riding, fishing, and join in various sports. They also have their own little jokes! Such as apple-pieing one another's beds. Their beds are in a dormitory which they keep tidy themselves and which look pictures of neatness with pot plants, pretty mats and lockers in which to keep their treasures. One little boy showed me his football in his locker. On the top shelf was his best tie and hanky with his initial worked in the corner. He was very proud of that initial, which he could feel all silky and bumpy as he pressed it to his cheek.

The girls over twenty-one have rooms to themselves, each one expressing her individuality in her furnishings and dainty embroidered pillowslip, an eiderdown, and attractive pictures for her visitors to look at. Each one has in her room a comfy mat, an easy chair, and a dressing table on which are flowers, powder boxes, and little trinkets which every girl collects. As a rule these older girls spend their evenings in their sitting-room around the cheery fire, typing, playing the gramophone, or doing fancy work. The children have a playroom where they keep their precious toy trains. They run their fingers all over them and guess what real ones look like. When they return to their homes for the Christmas holidays the train-drivers, before the journey starts, let them touch the real engine to know what kind of material it is made of, and so with the feel, the exciting noises, the hissing of the steam and the smell of smoke, they get fairly accurate conceptions of what a train is like.

Mr. Clutha MacKenzie, the blind Director of the Institute, showed me one of the watches which most of the adult blind people carry with them. There are two pearl dots at the quarter hours and one at the full hour, and the hands are raised so that the time can be felt. Mr. MacKenzie also showed me a Braille-writer, which is quite small, about eight inches long, with three keys at each end. Writing in Braille is really a shorthand system, the words being abbreviated. There are only six dots and over two hundred and forty signs to be memorised!

The blind director took a stout sheet of buff paper, and with the Braillewriter he punched out my name and a greeting which was a row of puzzling looking raised dots. As you can guess I am very proud of my piece of Braille.

Returning to Wellington in the train I felt very, very grateful not to have my eyes clouded like those of the blind,

A scene on the Pelorus Rive, Nelson Province. South Island, New Zealand.

so that I could see all the beauties unfolding from the carriage window. Greetings to you all.