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Enchanted Princess 175 Answering tears flashed up in the mother’s passionate eyes. “Was he your friend, little honey?” she said, brokenly, and hid her face in her apron. “Ca’line they kin learn when they’s little,” the husband’s distracted pleading began again. She silenced him with a gesture, and staggering blindly to her feet, went over to her huddled group of children, and drew from the midst of them a beautiful sturdy little boy of about six years. “Take him!” she panted. “Take him ’fore his mammy’s love ruins him too—” “Another deaf child!” Mr. Lincoln cried. “Yes—yes! My little baby child! My oldest an’ my youngest, both deef. I ‘lowed never to let my baby go, but now—” A rush of tears cut her short. “Mammy’s got to let you go—she’s got to let her baby go,” she sobbed to the child. Taking his small hand she placed it in Webster’s. “You be good to him—you learn him, honey,” she implored. Nobody ever called on little old Webster in vain. His stricken face relaxed now into a smile, greeting this new friendship that had flowered out of the one so tragically broken. The little boy hung back a moment, his big mute eyes questioning the other. Then, suddenly, his face broke into a copy of Webster’s own smile, he made a little chuckling inarticulate sound, and snuggled his small body confidingly up against the other. And little old Webster, all unconscious that he had been the means of rescuing this child from one of the most pathetic lives which the world has to offer,—that of an uneducated deaf mute, —took the little boy’s soft fingers and began at once to shape them into the sign that Christopher’s had died in—the little sign for friend. c The Enchanted Princess THE OPEN DOOR of a farm-house stood wide and dark. Something moved deep in its shadows; there was a flash of pink and the door framed the figure of a little girl. She stood a moment staring listlessly at the warm October landscape; then, descending the steps, sank down on the lowest and dropped her glowering little face to her cupped hands. She was seven years old, but she did not know it. Her name was Mary Lewis, but she did not know that either. She did not even know that there were such things as names, for she was an untaught deaf child. In all her seven years of life, she never “The Enchanted Princess” is from the Volta Review 18 (July 1916). Reprinted in Closed Doors: Studies of Deaf and Blind Children, rev. and enlarged ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934). 176 Margaret Prescott Montague heard a word and never spoken one. She could taste, smell, touch, and see, but she could not hear. Her world was forever being invaded by a mysterious something which baffled and terrified her, to meet with she had no faculty; something which goaded her to impotent fury or to tears, making of her a passionate, deaf, inarticulate little outlaw in the midst of a hearing, speaking, and law-abiding world. All about her now the air was full of sound; wind in the trees; quarreling of blue jays; clucking chickens crooning in the sun-lit yard; and of it all little Mary Lewis knew nothing. Why did a man driving down the road stop outside their barn and move his lips? And why did her father come out of the barn and move his, too? What did it mean when people moved their lips? Shut fast in her prison of deafness, she could not understand. Strive as she might, she could not. Presently, as she sat there, she saw two small girls of about her own age come out of the house across the road and approach her gate, hand in hand. Mary’s family had only lately moved to the country. In the few short weeks since her arrival she had watched these children wistfully. Almost every morning they went running down the long white road, not to reappear again until half the day was over. She knew that they went to a big house on a hill, and there joined a number of other children; but what they all did there together she could not guess, going to school being just one more of the unknown quantities in her bewildered existence. One morning she had followed...

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