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We encourage outings and games, and are soon to try dancing and skating. In fact, our men have been clamoring for some time for a dance. We are careful in our work and play to keep the blind men and blind women apart, though we have no objection to their sighted friends of both sexes being with them. Through the cooperation of the flower mission our home teachers have been able to distribute many flowers to the blind in the tenements, where they brought much pleasure into cheerless lives.

All the officers of our Association have given their services voluntarily. One of them especially has worked very hard. I would like to make particular mention of the superintendent of our workshop. The blind men were clamoring for work, but we could not find a superintendent who would make the thing a success, when Mr. Morford offered his services. In ten days the shop was in full blast. There is still a tradition that Mr. Morford makes a great deal of money out of it. I have never yet been able to find out how much Mr. Morford takes out of his own pocket for the Association. But I do know that nothing goes into his pockets from it.

One of our most useful activities is keeping at our office reading and writing appliances and inventions which have been found of help to the blind, and having their use intelligently explained. Our idea is to be an accessible information bureau and depot of supplies for the blind, and their middle man and friend. We are glad to take orders for anything from a Bible to a pack of cards; from a printing machine to a self-threading needle.

Many friends and relatives of the blind come to us utterly ignorant of what can be done to make their lives more bearable. Light through work is our motto. It is a good one. What we were laughed at for believing a year ago, we have proved, and other organizations and communities are looking for the light which we have found.

When I asked the head of our telephone company to give a switchboard for blind people to practice on, he thought I was crazy. That was a year ago. Doubting my sanity, and solely to get rid of me, he ordered the switchboard installed, asking whether I preferred mahogany or cherry. I said cherry would do, as we were young I had the pleasure of writing him the other day, asking for the installation of a switchboard at our new office, and told him that there were now in the city of New York five blind switchboard operators -- two in hospitals, in positions of great responsibility, where they have the ambulance calls and other emergency work; two in business houses, and one in the editorial rooms of a great New York daily paper. The most encouraging part of the switchboard work is that two of the present employers of our blind pupils have suggested that they would like each to employ another blind person in their offices.

One of the most difficult classes for us to give light to is what one of our blind cooperators calls the blind sighted public. We try to teach the blind sighted public by propaganda, and by our little museum where we show examples of the best work created by the blind. Here are two beautiful bronzes made by the blind sculptor, Vidal. These are, indeed, eye-openers -- exquisite sculpture done by a blind man who was worthy pupil of Baryé.

Recently, largely through the exertions of our vice-president and his wife, I was enabled to light the light of lighthouse No. 2, to give light through work to the blind in Buffalo. The blind were very helpful themselves in starting our first branch. I found in the almshouse in Buffalo a number of blind people. One man had been a bridge builder and had bossed gangs of workmen. The message which he sent to the business men of Buffalo who doubted the necessity of an organization for the blind was, perhaps, the final word which started one there. "Tell them," said he, "that if a hard-working, proud man, who has bossed gangs of men and helped to build bridges, loses his sight and is sent to the almshouse to rot he will go mad. Tell them that if they will give me a chance to work I will work now." He is working now!

Perhaps our Association can do most good when it is realized from what a very little acorn our oak sprang. All of our present activities emanated from one ordinary and not large private house in New York; in library which is eighteen feet by ten. The head office of the Association is still there. There the original switchboard was installed, and in this same room (eighteen by ten) our blind people have been taught typewriting; our classes have assembled; orders are taken for work, and we have often counted over twenty people busily employed here at once. The workshop started in a loft in a business building. One of our blind home teachers has received regularly the largest classes of women at her home. The State Census of the Blind, of which our experts have said such complimentary things, is still lodged in my studio, in this same house, where busts and clay tubs are decently shrouded in unbleached muslin, until we take possession of our new office building. We started on a capital of $400 from the ticket bureau. We depend entirely on voluntary gifts. Our census work, of course, was helped by the state.