and companion. Wight was engaged to a Unitarian missionary, George Bond, and following their marriage, the couple planned to travel to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). Bridgman begged to go along as Wight's housekeeper but, ultimately, Wight went without her, leaving Bridgman with no friend, companion or teacher to console her. Religion With no outward sources of consolation, Bridgman turned inward to prayer and meditation. She eventually embraced her family's Baptist religion and was baptized in July 1852. She began occasionally to write devotional poems, of which "Holy Home" is the best known: Heaven is holy home. Holy Home is from ever lasting to ever lasting. Holy home is Summery. Holy home shall endure forever... Bridgman feared death, but she saw heaven as a "place where these fears might at last be laid to rest". Adult years Bridgman's formal education ended when Wight left the school in 1850. She returned to New Hampshire and, for a time, she enjoyed being reunited with her family; however, she was homesick for the school and her anorexia eventually returned. When Howe learned that Bridgman's health was rapidly deteriorating, he sent a teacher, Mary Paddock, to the Bridgman home to take his former student back to the school. Bridgman's health gradually improved, and though she received occasional visitors, she was now largely forgotten by the public. She occupied herself by writing letters to her mother and a few friends — Bridgman kept in touch with both Mary Swift and Sarah Wight — sewing, reading the Bible in braille, and keeping her room fastidiously clean. She earned a little spending money, about $100 a year, from selling her crocheted doilies, purses, and embroidered handkerchiefs, but she was primarily dependent upon the school to supply her with room and board. Bridgman lived a relatively quiet and uneventful life at the school. She never became a full-time teacher, but she did assist the young blind girls in their sewing classes where she was considered a "patient but demanding instructor." In 1872, several cottages (each under a matron) for the blind girls were added to the Perkins campus, and Bridgman was moved from the larger house of the Institution into one of them. Bridgman, always eager for someone to communicate with in sign language, befriended Anne Sullivan when they shared a cottage in the early 1880s. The death of Howe in 1876 was a great grief to her; but