Now and then I meet deaf people who complain bitterly at the treatment which society metes out to them. In most cases I think they are wrong, for we must all admit squarely the foundation fact of our affliction, which is that we may very easily become a trouble and a nuisance socially. We represent perhaps two per cent of the nation’s population, and we can hardly expect the other ninety-eight per cent always to understand us. I have had people move away from me as though they expected me to bite them. Some sensitive souls might feel that they were thus associated with mad dogs, but it is better to see the humor of it. For my part, I have come to realize that I am barred from terms of social equality with those who live in the kingdom of sound. I have come to be prepared for a certain amount of impatience and annoyance. I am often myself impatient with those dull souls who depend so entirely upon their ears that they have failed to cultivate the instinct or the intuition which enables us to grasp a situation at a glance. But I do ask for our people a fair hearing, if I may put it that way. While we are deprived of many of your opportunities and possibilities, we think we have developed something which you lack, perhaps unconsciously. We can turn our experience over to you if you will be patient. Do not fear that I shall corner you to make you listen to a tale of woe. The truth is that I often feel, in all sincerity, exceedingly sorry for you poor unfortunates who must listen to all the small talk and the skim-milk of conversation. “I saw a smith stand with his hammer—thus, The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool, With open mouth swallowing a tailor’s news!” It is so long since I have been able to chatter and play with words that I forget what people talk about. Some of them at least seem to have talked their tongues loose from their brains. I often ask intelligent people after this chatter what it was all about, and whether their brains were really working as they babbled on. Not one in ten can give any good reason for the conversation or remember twenty words of it. Do you wonder that we of the silence, seeing this waste of words, pick up our strong and enduring book and wander away with the great undying characters of history, rather thankful that we are not as other men, condemned to waste good time on such trivial exercise of ears and tongues? That is the way we like to think about it, but there is a worm in this philosophy after all. I have reasoned things out in this way fifty times; the logic seems perfect, and yet my mind works back from my book to the story of John Armstrong and his New England farm.