The wide current interest in the possibilities of education for the blind (see entry for 26 March above) had found handsome expression in Col. Thomas Handasyd Perkins’ gift for the establishment of the Perkins Institution for the Blind. The gift carried with it a requirement for matching gifts of fifty thousand dollars. A Fair at Faneuil Hall was conceived as a major means toward the realization of this sum. Twelve thousand people attended during the four days the Fair was open. Nearly thirteen thousand dollars was raised, of which “two dollars only were counterfeit.” Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis Jr. (Eliza Boardman), an energetic widow, took conspicuous leadership in the fund-raising effort. Later in the year her efforts and those of the Boston ladies associated with her were subjected to merciless satire in a volume issued anonymously in New York under the title Scenes at the Fair. It later became known that the author was Fanny Inglis, afterward Mme. Calderón de la Barca, who is better known as the author of the letters to William H. Prescott published as Life in Mexico, 1841 (vol. 4:185; Columbian Centinel, 30 April, p. 2, col. 4; 11 May, p. 1, cols. 1–4; 22 May, p. 2, col. 5; Morison, H. G. Otis , 1969, p. 491–492, 547).