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Dear students, I'm Shish Pal Chauhan from S. Chauhan Institute, Jagadhri, district Yamuna Nagar, State Haryana
Today, I've brought the 9th chapter for the students of class X, their novel The story of My life by Helen Keller
Let's begin the the Chapter.
Helen’s visit to Boston was the next most important event of her life. She remembers all, the preparations, the departure with her teacher and her mother, the journey and finally her arrival in Boston.
She had made a journey to Baltimore two years before this journey. There was a lot of difference between the two journeys.
That time, she was a restless, excitable little creature who required the attention of everyone on the train to keep her amused. She sat quietly near Miss Sullivan and listened to her teacher’s explanation intently.
She explained all she was watching outside the car window. She was explaining “all....the beautiful Tennesse river, the great cotton fields, the crowds of laughing negroes at the stations, who waved to the people on the train and brought delicious candy and popcorn balls through the car.
Her big rag doll was placed on the seat just in front of her. It was in a new dress made of ‘gingham (light weight cotton cloth)’, looking at her from her two beady eyes.
After sometime, when her mind was diverted from her teacher’s explanation, she remembered her doll Nancy. She would like to keep her in her arms, but she convinced herself that she was asleep.
Helen wants to continue talking about Nancy. She continues with an experience that she had immediately after their arrival in Boston.
She had compelled her doll to eat mud-pies, so she was covered with mud, although she had never found any encouragement from the doll for eating them.
Then, the laundress at the Perkins Institution took it secretly and gave it a bath, which reduced it to be a formless heap of cotton, beyond recognition except its two beady eyes.
At Perkins, Helen immediately started making friends with the blind children there. It delighted her very much that they knew manual alphabet.
She felt extremely happy to talk with other children in her own language. It took her sometime to know that the children with whom she was talking so heartily were also blind.
They surrounded her lovingly and joined in her frolics (merry-making). She felt surprise and pain when they placed their hands over hers; when she talked to them and they read books with their fingers.
Although she had been told beforehand, yet she thought vaguely that since they were able to hear, they must be able to see somehow through their ‘second sight’, i.e. their hearing faculty.
But she found them so happy and contented that she lost sense of pain in the pleasure of their companions.
Only one day that she spent with the blind children made her feel thoroughly at home in her new environment. She waited eagerly from one pleasant experience to another with the passage of time.
She regarded Boston as the beginning and the end of the world.
While staying at Boston, she visited Bunker Hall and she had her first lesson of history there. She came to know the story of the brave men who had fought on the place where they stood at that time.
It excited her greatly. She imagined that the brave soldiers must have climbed the great stairway and shot at the enemy on the ground below it.
So she excitedly climbed the monument through that stairway counting the steps and wondered as she went up higher and higher.
Helen’s first trip to ocean was when she went to Pymouth in a steamboat. But the rumble created by the engine of the steamboat made her think that the clouds were thundering and it was going to rain.
It made her afraid that her outdoor trip would be cancelled, so she began to cry. She was more interested in touching the great rock where pilgrims used t reach there.
She often held in her hand a model of the pilgrim rock. It was given to her by a kind gentleman at Pilgrim Hall.
She had felt its curves by her fingers, the split in the centre and also the embossed (raised design or mark) “figure 1620”.
Then she would reflect in her mind everything she knew about the wonderful story of the Pilgrims.
In her childish imagination, she had idealized those pilgrims as the bravest and the most generous men. But, she was very surprised and disappointed when she learnt their disgraceful actions.
Mr. William Endicott and his daughter were among her many friends. She had very sweet memories attached to them.
She remembers how she went through the rose garden and one day when she visited their beautiful home at Beverly Farms.
She also remembers how their dogs, big Leo and little curly –haired Fritz with long ears came to meet her. She also mentions here how ***, the swiftest of the horses, poked his nose into her hands for a pat and lump of sugar.
She also remembers the beach where she had played in the sand for the first time. Mr. Endicott told her about the great ships that came sailing by from Boston and those were bound for Europe.
She saw him many times after that. As he was a very good friend of her, she was thinking of when she called Boston “The City of kind hearts.”
Questions may be asked about: a.“Boston the City of Kind Hearts.” B. Incident about her big doll, Nancy c. Her first trip to Ocean d. Journey to Boston and the journey to Baltimore, compare and contrast.