Frontispiece from Leonard Barton, the Blind Boy, and Other Stories

Frontispiece from Leonard Barton, the Blind Boy, and Other Stories

This book's frontispiece depicts smiling children guiding blind Leonard, taller than the rest and wearing a hat, to sit in their teacher's chair. Leonard then tells of how he became blind with great embellishment and a strangely adult attitude of wisdom. On the Fourth of July, he disobeyed his mother's warnings not to go into the village and was accidentally blinded by the discharge of a cannon blank. The story concludes with a clear moral, but flattens Leonard's character by not addressing the real trauma that would accompany such an event.

William E. C. Knowles

Blakeman & Mason

1860