(This present is an elegant doll, with movable eyelids and a momma sound.)
It's for Helen. And we took up a collection to buy it. And Laura dressed it.
ANNIE: It's beautiful!
CHILDREN: So don't forget, you be sure to give it to Helen from us, Annie!
ANNIE: I promise it will be the first thing I give her. If I don't keep it for myself, that is, you know I can't be trusted with dolls!
Select the excerpt from The Story of My Life by Helen Keller that shows Helen's viewpoint of this event.
My aunt made me a big doll out of towels. It was the most comical shapeless thing, this improvised doll, with no nose,
mouth, ears or eyes-nothing that even the imagination of a child could convert into a face.
The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll. The little blind children at the Perkins
Institution had sent it and Laura Bridgman had dressed it; but I did not know this until afterward.
One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled "d-0-1-1" and tried
to make me understand that "d-o-1-" applied to both. Earlier in the day we had had a tussle over the words "m-u-9" and "W-
a-t-e-r."
Dr. Bell advised my father to write to Mr. Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institution in Boston, the scene of Dr. Howe's
great labours for the blind, and ask him if he had a teacher competent to begin my education,