And this for a very obvious reason.
After all, the main interest in life is in easy, familiar intercourse with
our fellows. I love to watch a golden sunset, to walk in the high beech
woods in spring--or, for that matter, in summer or autumn or winter--to see
the apples reddening on the trees, and the hedgerows thick with
blackberries. But this is the setting of my drama--the scenery of the play,
not the play itself. It is its human contacts that give life its vivacity
and intensity. And it is the ear and tongue that are the channels of the
cheerful interplay of mind with mind. In that interplay the blind man has
full measure and brimming over. His very affliction intensifies his part in
the human comedy and gives him a peculiar delight in homely intercourse. He
is not merely at his ease in the human family: he is the centre of it. He
fulfils Johnson's test of a good fellow: he is "a clubbable man."
And even in the enjoyment of the external world it may be doubted whether
he does not find as much mental stimulus as the deaf-and-dumb.
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