Later I shall describe some of the local treatments to which my poor ears have been subjected. It would make a volume in itself were I to tell all, and it would record the experience of most country people who go down the silent road. Frequently the city man may obtain expert advice from aurists who fully understand that they are dealing with an interior nerve or brain disease. Most of us who were “brought up” in the country fell into the hands of physicians who appeared to think deafness is what they call a “mechanical disease,” much like the sprain of the knee or wrist. That country doctor saw only the wax on the ear drum, when the real trouble was far inside. So we are blistered and oiled and irrigated—and the real seat of the trouble is not reached. Of course I should have found some one competent to treat my case. That is easily said, but the great majority of young men in my day were without capital, quite incapable of taking advice, and they labored under the conviction that any public admission of serious disease would be considered a weakness that was like a stigma. I have been singularly unsuccessful in obtaining original impressions from deaf people in trying to learn from them just what were their sensations when it became evident, past all argument, that they were to walk softly through ever-increasing silence. It would seem that they rarely have great imagination; perhaps silence, and a lack of the stimulant of sound, destroys that faculty. Psychology estimates that of all the senses hearing has the greatest influence over the emotions and the morals. I fancy that the violent effort to readjust life habits to a new existence bewilders most of us, so that the mind is incapable of working in exactly the old way. Apparently many of the deaf fall into a morbid, hopelessly despondent frame of mind, which does not permit any reasonable and useful research into the habits and landmarks which characterize a strange country. I know how useless it is to tell the ordinary deaf man that it is a rare privilege to know and to study the ideas which special messengers bring to us in the silent world. I know that what I tell him is true, yet I am forced to agree with him when he says that he would give it all for the privilege of hearing a hand-organ playing on a street corner. Still, it is a part of the game for us to believe that in many ways the deaf are the favored of the Lord.