While the inhabitants of every locality are usually anxious to increase their population, I am very frank to say that some of the recruits wished upon us are not a full credit to our community. The world in which we must live is naturally gloomy, where canned sunshine must be used about as canned fruit is carried into the northern snows. It is no help to have our ranks filled with discontented, unhappy beings who spend the years which might be made the best of their lives in bemoaning their fate and reminding the rest of us of our affliction. What we are trying to do is to forget it as far as we can. The deaf man does not want the world’s pity. That is the most distasteful thing you can hand him, even though it be wrapped in gold. For the expressed pity of our friends only leads to self-pity, and that, sooner or later, will pit the face of the soul like a case of moral smallpox. The most depressing thing I have to encounter is the well-meant pity of friends and acquaintances. I know from their faces that they are shuddering at the thought of my affliction, and I see them discussing it, as they look at me! Why can they not stop cultivating my trouble? All we ask is a fair chance to make a self-respecting living and to be treated as human beings. This compassion makes me feel that I am being analyzed and separated like an anatomical specimen; there will come to me out of the distant past of sound the bitter words of a great actor, who said as Shylock: “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?”