The World I Live In by Helen Keller — Read

LOOK in your "Century Dictionary," or if you are blind, ask your teacher to do it for you, and learn how many idioms are made on the idea of hand, and how many words are formed from the Latin root _manus_ -- enough words to name all the essential affairs of life. "Hand," with quotations and compounds, occupies twenty-four columns, eight pages of this dictionary. The hand is defined as "the organ of apprehension. " How perfectly the definition fits my case in both senses of the word "apprehend"! With my hand I seize and hold all that I find in the three worlds -- physical, intellectual, and spiritual.

Think how man has regarded the world in terms of the hand. All life is divided between what lies _on one hand_ and on the other. The products of skill are _manu_factures. The conduct of affairs is _man_agement. History seems to be the record -- alas for our chronicles of war! -- of the _man_oeuvres of armies. But the history of peace, too, the narrative of labour in the field, the forest, and the vineyard, is written in the victorious sign _manual_ -- the sign of the hand that has conquered the wilderness. The labourer himself is called a _hand_. In _man_acle and _manu_mission we read the story of human slavery and freedom.