The way to write good English is to read it and hear it. Thus it is that any child may be taught to use correct English by not being allowed to read or hear any other kind. In a child, the selection of the better from the worse is not conscious; he is the servant of his word experience. The ordinary man will never be rid of the fallacy that words obey thought, that one thinks first and phrases afterward. There must first, it is true, be the intention, the desire to utter something, but the idea does not often become specific, does not take shape until it is phrased; certainly an idea is a different thing by virtue of being phrased. Words often make the thought, and the master of words will say things greater than are in him. A remarkable example is a paragraph from Miss Keller's sketch in the Youth's Companion. Writing of the moment when she learned that everything has a name, she says: "We met the nurse carrying my little cousin; and teacher spelled 'baby.' AND FOR THE FIRST TIME I was impressed with the smallness and helplessness of a little baby, and mingled with the thought there was another one of myself, and I was glad I was myself, and not a baby." It was a word that created these thoughts in her mind. So the master of words is master of thoughts which the words create, and says things greater than he could otherwise know. Helen Keller writing "The Frost King" was building better than she knew and saying more than she meant. Whoever makes a sentence of words utters not his wisdom, but the wisdom of the race whose life is in the words, though they have never been so grouped before. The man who can write stories thinks of stories to write. The medium calls forth the thing it conveys, and the greater the medium the deeper the thoughts. The educated man is the man whose expression is educated. The substance of thought is language, and language is the one thing to teach the deaf child and every other child. Let him get language and he gets the very stuff that language is made of, the thought and the experience of his race. The language must be one used by a nation, not an artificial thing. Volapük is a paradox, unless one has French or English or German or some other language that has grown up in a nation. The deaf child who has only the sign language of De l'Epee is an intellectual Philip Nolan, an alien from all races, and his thoughts are not the thoughts of an Englishman, or a Frenchman, or a Spaniard. The Lord's prayer in signs is not the Lord's prayer in English. In his essay on style De Quincey says that the best English is to be found in the letters of the cultivated gentlewoman, because she has read only a few good books and has not been corrupted by the style of newspapers and the jargon of street, market-place, and assembly hall.