Years of Blindness. 53 



reaud's acquaintance, and found a class of young men 

 preparing themselves under his guidance to become 

 teachers of his system. Having sight enough at the 

 time to get about alone, he enlisted with these pupils, 

 simply with the hope of gain. Goureaud had applied 

 his system to all the important dates of secular and 

 ecclesiastical history, and these had to be learned by 

 the young teachers as illustrations to their audiences 

 of the power of the mnemonic system. Youmans 

 presently went home to Milton, where he could have 

 the help of others' eyes, and began memorizing long 

 lists of biblical and political dates. This labour was 

 soon accomplished, and he taught his first class in 

 Saratoga. He could not read the text-book, but for- 

 tunately his sight was sufficient to enable him to read 

 a few notes printed in large characters upon slips of 

 paper .concealed within it. He had no pleasure in the 

 work for its own sake, but he was happy to be able 

 to earn something, and for several months he taught 

 these classes at intervals in neighbouring towns. The 

 topics to which Goureaud applied the system had for 

 him little importance. From the first he began a list 

 of his own, made up of the dates of inventions and 

 discoveries. This was congenial work, and he spent 

 all his leisure in collecting and memorizing facts of this 

 sort. As his list grew, and was marked off into cen- 

 turies and classified according to subjects, he became 

 more and more interested in the growth of knowledge, 

 and especially in the progress of the sciences and their 

 successive dependence one upon another. He was 

 fairly successful in teaching, but in this itinerant life 

 he often took severe colds, with consequent relapses 

 into blindness, and so he had to abandon the work. 

 But he kept up the study of scientific progress with 



