Staring is one of the greatest evils. Children demonstrate this repeatedly.

A little Jewish girl had been coming to us for a year. On her first visit, she told us that the school nurse insisted that her eyes should be examined for glasses. Her mother was with her and begged me not to put them on the child, as she had a great dislike for them. She also believed that glasses could not possibly cure her. I was glad that I did not have to spend time convincing the mother that her little girl would not need them.

I tested the child's sight with the card and found that she had 20/70 with the right eye and 20/100 with the left. The girl stared constantly while she read the letters and I drew her mother's attention to this fact. I instructed the child to took away in another direction after she had read one or two letters of a line; she then improved her sight with both eyes to 20/50. Her mother was a valuable help to me in supervising the child's practice at home. No matter what the child was doing, or whenever she read a book or studied her lessons, the mother told her not to stare.

The directions for treatment at home and in school were simple. For Instance, when she was asked to read something on tbe blackboard, she was not to look at the whole of a word or a sentence at one time. She was to look at the first letter of a word and blink her eyes. It would then clear up, and she could see the whole word without staring. In order to read a sentence without staring, she was to look at the first letter of the first word and then look at the last letter of the last word of the sentence, and to blink her eyes frequently while doing this.

How proud I was when she was promoted into a higher class without the aid of glasses I She was very grateful for what we had accomplished. Her school teacher, who had a very high degree of myopia, was so impressed by her marked improvement that she also became a patient of Dr. Bates, and is now enjoying good sight without glasses. Proof of her cure may be seen in the wonderful needle work which she is able to do.