The average man does not begin to realize how sadly he has neglected the training of his vocal organs. I have known men who have less than half the articulation of a bullfrog to blame people with dull hearing because they cannot understand the muffled mouthings and lazy vocalisms. Here we deaf have a real grievance. There ought to be a world where the blame and the ridicule for a failure to hear would go to the talker rather than to the listener. The mouth is more often at fault than the ears, although society will not have it so. There are people who run their words together like beads crowded on a string. Others talk as though their mouths were made for eating entirely, and were constantly employed for that purpose. “His mouth is full of hot hasty pudd’n,” is the way my deaf aunt would put it—and she was right in more ways than one, for usually these mumblers and mouthers come with a foolish or useless message, though they may consider it of the highest importance. Others seem to consider it bad form to talk loud enough for the ordinary ear to catch the sounds. I frequently wonder if people with such featureless voices realize how they are regarded by those who are approaching the silence. They seem to me persons who have hidden a priceless talent—not in the earth like the unfaithful servant of the parable, but in their chests, like a miser. It seems to me a crime to turn what might become a flute or a silver-toned cornet into a whimpering bellows or a cracked tin horn. I would have every child trained in some form of elocutlon or music; such lessons would be far more useful to the world than much of the geography and so-called science now taught in our schools. Many blunders can be traced to the mumblers and lazy-voiced talkers. Some of our commonest and most amusing mishaps are caused by our getting only a word here and there in a conversation—and it often happens that we seize upon something unimportant in a sentence and dress it up grotesquely with our own ideas of what the speaker is trying to convey. This is bad business, I know, but many people show such impatience when we ask for repetitions that we prefer to take chances. I remember one farm family consisting years ago of a very deaf and dominating woman, her mild and well-drilled husband, and the boy they were “bringing up.” The woman mastered the household, partly because it was her nature to rule, and partly because it was impossible to argue with her. She never heard any opposing opinions. The evidence was always all one way—her way. The dominant or self-assertive deaf are the greatest tyrants on earth; those who are not self-assertive are usually bossed and put aside. In this family the deaf man and the boy well knew how to keep to their places. There was something calculated to make you shiver in the almost uncanny way the deaf woman would catch that boy at his tricks. Every now and then she would stand him up in a corner, point a long, bony finger at him and demand: