affected the sense of hearing in other unhappy persons: they had
submitted to surgical treatment, generally with cheering results. I
submitted in my turn. All that skill could do for me was done, and
without effect. My deafness steadily increased; my case was pronounced to
be hopeless; the great authorities retired.

"Judicious friends, who had been waiting for their opportunity, undertook
the moral management of me next.

"I was advised to cultivate cheerfulness, to go into society, to
encourage kind people who tried to make me hear what was going on, to be
on my guard against morbid depression, to check myself when the sense of
my own horrible isolation drove me away to my room, and, last but by no
means least, to beware of letting my vanity disincline me to use an
ear-trumpet.

"I did my best, honestly did my best, to profit by the suggestions that
were offered to me--not because I believed in the wisdom of my friends,
but because I dreaded the effect of self-imposed solitude on my nature.
Since the fatal day when I had opened the sealed packet, I was on my
guard against the inherited evil lying dormant, for all I knew to the
contrary, in my father's son. Impelled by that horrid dread, I suffered
my daily martyrdom with a courage that astonishes me when I think of it
now.

"What the self-inflicted torture of the deaf is, none but the deaf can
understand.

"When benevolent persons did their best to communicate to me what was
clever or amusing, while conversation was going on in my presence, I was