“I’m a poor Irishman, half-drunk now, ye see. I cannot sing without whiskey. I make me living at vaudeville, and the movies is bad for the business. I sing funny songs—some of them nasty. I know it’s a bad living, but sometimes, like now, I love the best old songs. But on the stage—” He shrugged. “But tonight, instead of singing your comic songs, go on the stage and sing as you have done for me. It would be wonderful.” “No, they’d get a hook and pull me off. You don’t understand. The people who come to hear me have got to laugh or die. Their lives are too hard. They must laugh and forget it. Make them _think_ and cry and they would go crazy. That is where you folks go wrong on us. You say to _think_ and work out of our troubles—but sorrow is always with us, and we must laugh or we shall drink and die.” Then came the reception committee on the run for me, for my time on the program had come and the speaker who was to hold the stage until I came had already repeated part of his speech three times. The barber finished shaving me, and I went my way; but I shall always remember my Irish singer and his philosophy. “_A man in trouble must either laugh or die._” CHAPTER XIII SILENCE NOT ALWAYS GOLDEN Looking Wise and Saying Nothing—Passing Encouragement Around—The Critic and the Short Skirts—The “Lion” and the Honest Deaf Man—How Reputation and the Deaf Man Overtook the Hon. Robt. Grey—The Simultaneous Blessings at the Dinner-table—Jealousy and Mrs. Brewster. It has been said of a Cape Cod man that if he will tell where he comes from, _look wise_ and say nothing, he will pass as a person of fine intellect. Much the same is true of the deaf man. He is too apt to talk all the time, or else to say nothing—and sometimes he does both at once. Many of us betray the shoals of our mind and our shallow waters of thought by talking too much. The Yankee is naturally inquisitive. He has injured his position in history by asking too many useless questions. Unfortunately, this is also the failing of too many of the deaf. Instead of realizing that the choicest bits of conversation are reserved for them, they persist in trying to borrow the dross. Cardinal Wolsey’s outburst of bitter self-reproach would be a valuable memory gem for us: “I charge thee, fling away ambition. By that crime fell the angels.”