Then the Doctor began: "About a month ago I attended the funeral of a man in whom I have taken a deep interest all my life. He was an old man, and a plain man all his long life; yet, though I have attended a great many funerals in the last half-century, I don't think I ever saw a greater uprising of the people to offer the last tribute of respect and affection to a plain man in their midst. I want to tell you a little about that man. Miller, his name was, Daniel Miller; he was older than I, and in my young days I used to watch him from his pew in the church. I liked his face, even then, before I knew him; a grave, half-sad face, yet never gloomy—only a look of patient resignation to the inevitable. A Christian man he was, one of the sterling sort. Talk with anybody in that town about him, and they would pay almost instant tribute to his sterling worth, and almost always close with, 'What a pity that such a good man as he is should be so hard of hearing.' "That was his trouble, and a great trouble it was. I suppose it was the means of breaking in pieces a number of plans of his youth. Well, the thought was written all over his patient, sad face: 'I am hard of hearing and growing worse. It destroys my usefulness, it hinders my work in every direction, it makes me appear unsocial and unsympathetic, in short, it is a burden hard to be borne.' As I watched him, I could see that this feeling grew upon him; grew with his infirmity, and that progressed quite rapidly. "You have no idea, I suppose, what a drawback it was to him on all occasions. It got so that he didn't dare to open his lips in the prayer meeting. He would look all around him, to see whether anybody was speaking, but some of the members had a way of keeping their seats when they talked, so he found that he couldn't tell by their position, and once or twice he arose and began to pray when some one was talking; he was a diffident man, and it embarrassed him dreadfully. Then he used to say that he never knew whether what he had to offer was in a line with what had been said, or was very wide of the mark; and if the minister asked him to pray, he had to shout out the request, and sometimes poor Mr. Miller couldn't hear it, and his wife would have to give his elbow a nudge, and lean over and whisper to him loud enough for all the house to hear, 'He wants you to lead in prayer.' "It was a real embarrassment all around. People didn't wonder that he gradually grew into the feeling that he couldn't take part very often in religious meetings; though I never thought that was right; I always believed that his prayers would be in a line with what the Lord wanted to have said, and that he would be safe enough, whether he followed the line of the others or not. "So it went on, Daniel Miller growing deafer and deafer, and the patient, sad look on his face deepening, and the feeling growing in his heart that he wasn't of any use to the Church of Christ that he loved with all his soul.