I have often been asked if deaf people of middle-age can safely be entrusted with the bringing up of a little child. That depends—both on the grown people and the child. Generally speaking, I should not advise it. Deaf people are likely to be obstinate in their opinions, rather narrow in thought, and slow to understand that the habits and tendencies of society grow like a tree. Many of them have made a brilliant success in certain lines of work, but they are apt to be narrow as a board outside of their limited range. In rearing a child it is a great disadvantage not to be able to hear its little whispered confidences; if the little one has no reliable confidant it will grow up hard and unsympathetic, or it will go with its confidences to the wrong person. I know deaf people who regret bitterly that they can only give financial aid and reasonable example to their children, while they long to enter into that part of child life which can only be reached through sound. Looking back over life, I become convinced that my hearing was always a little dull; probably the trouble started in a case of scarlet fever when I was a baby, and in those days no one thought of examining or treating the ears of a child. Also, I think one of my teachers helped to start me along the road to silence. Those were the days when “corporal punishment” was not only permitted, but was encouraged. Most of us were brought up on the “Scriptures and a stick,” and each teacher seemed to select some special portion of the human anatomy as the most susceptible part through which to make her authority felt. Some of the educational methods of those days were effective even if they were violent. I have had the teacher point a long stick at me and issue the order: “Spell incomprehensibility!” I would stumble on as far as “ability” and then fall down completely. In these days my children are led gently over the bad place in the road, but then we took it at a jump. The teacher would lay that long stick three times over your back, and while the dust was rising from your jacket would make another demand. “_Now_ spell it!” And I must confess that we were then usually able to do so. This particular teacher chose the ear for her point of attack; she would steal up behind a whisperer or a loiterer and strike him over the ears with a large book, like a geography. Or she would upon occasion pull some special culprit out to the front of the school by the lobe of the ear. Such things are no longer permitted in the public schools, yet I frequently see people in sudden anger slap or “box” their children on the side of the face or on the ears. It is a cruel and degrading punishment, and, remembering my own experience, I always feel like striking those who are guilty of it squarely in their own faces with all my power.