“‘Oh, try and do something for her, sir!’ says I. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t give her up, sir!’ ‘My good soul,’ says he, ‘you must set her an example of cheerfulness, and keep up her spirits--that’s all that can be done for her now.’ ‘Not _all,_ sir,’ says I, ‘surely not _all!’_ ‘Indeed it is,’ says he; ‘her hearing is completely gone; the experiment with my watch proves it. I had an exactly similar case with the mason’s boy,’ he says, turning to the other doctor. ‘The shock of that fall has, I believe, paralyzed the auditory nerve in her, as it did in him.’ I remember those words exactly, sir, though I didn’t quite understand them at the time. But he explained himself to me very kindly; telling me over again, in a plain way, what he’d just told the doctor. He reminded me, too, that the remedies which had been already tried had been of no use; and told me I might feel sure that any others would only end in the same way, and put her to useless pain into the bargain. ‘I hope,’ says he, ‘the poor child is too young to suffer much mental misery under her dreadful misfortune. Keep her amused, and keep her talking, if you possibly can--though I doubt very much whether, in a little time, you won’t fail completely in getting her to speak at all.’ “‘Don’t say that, sir,’ says I; ‘don’t say she’ll be dumb as well as deaf; it’s enough to break one’s heart only to think of it.’ ‘But I _must_ say so,’ says he; ‘for I’m afraid it’s the truth.’ And then he asks me whether I hadn’t noticed already that she was unwilling to speak; and that, when she did speak, her voice wasn’t the same voice it used to be. I said ‘Yes,’ to that; and asked him whether the fall had had anything to do with it. He said, taking me up very short, it had everything to do with it, because the fall had made her, what they call, stone deaf, which prevented her from hearing the sound of her own voice. So it was changed, he told me, because she had no ear now to guide herself by in speaking, and couldn’t know in the least whether the few words she said were spoken soft or loud, or deep or clear. ‘So far as the poor child herself is concerned,’ says he, ‘she might as well be without a voice at all; for she has nothing but her memory left to tell her that she has one.’