The bullet-headed man uttered one short expressive word and sat down. At Forty-second Street two good-sized policemen appeared, but they waited for reinforcements before arresting the disturber. However, he went willingly, casting back a look of mingled fear and admiration at the deaf man. My friend did not know he was a hero until he learned that the belligerent gentleman was a champion middle-weight boxer, very drunk and very ugly. He had threatened to clean out the crowd—hence the sudden stampede. This deaf man tells me that if he had really known to whom the cauliflower ear belonged he would have been the first man out of the car. As it happened he gained a reputation for being the only man who ever told a “champ” to shut up, and then cooled him off by shaking a finger. I have known many deaf men who have escaped from such situations most marvelously uninjured. Yet while the deaf man is smiling at most of the terrors which approach him from without, he falls an easy prey to those which attack from within. Imagination will often lead a sensitive man into untold misery. Our hardest struggles come when we must strangle the imps of depression, our personal devils. They come with evil suggestion, frequently with actual voices, eager to poison the will and paralyze the courage. I have no doubt that Whittier’s great poem beginning: “_Spare me, dread angel of reproach_” was written as the result of subjective audition. I suppose the average person can never know how close the deaf are driven to temporary insanity in their struggles to overcome doubts and imaginary fears. Sometimes the fear concentrates upon the idea that they will lose sight as well as hearing! Or perhaps doubt of wife, children or friends will present itself forcibly. Little incidents, a feeling that people are laughing at their expense, some unintentional slight, a misunderstanding or a rude nervous shock, any of these may start the hateful imps which live in one part of the brain at their fearful work of poisoning the mind and the will. At times the deaf man finds it almost impossible to wrench free from these accursed influences.