In the concluding chapter, Chapter 23, Helen uses the space to acknowledge and honor some of the notable people she has met in her young life. (She was just 23 when this book was first published, and her adult life was really just beginning. She lived to the age of 87.) These include religious leaders Bishop Phillips Brooks (1835-1893) and Henry Drummond (1851-1897); scientist and inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922); and American writers Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809-1894), John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892), Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909), Laurence Hutton (1843-1904), William Dean Howells (1837-1920), Mark Twain (1935-1910), Richard Watson Gilder (1844-1909), Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908), Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900), and John Burroughs (1837-1921). She was fortunate enough to live in the right time period to meet all of these distinguished gentlemen at the turn of the century. In the chapter, she has nothing but glowing praise for them all, especially the writers:
They were all gentle and sympathetic and I felt the charm of their manner as much as I had felt the brilliancy of their essays and poems.
She and the Episcopalian Bishop Phillips Brooks kept up a lengthy correspondence. Naturally, she thinks highly of Dr. Bell and his work on behalf of deaf children. She expresses her gratitude to all of them here:
In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges, and enabled me to walk serene and happy in the shadow cast by my deprivation.
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