about me. I was deaf to everything--with the one exception of the music
of the birds.

"How long did I hear the little cheering songsters who comforted me?

"I am unable to measure the interval that elapsed: my memory fails me. I
only know that the time came, when I could see the skylark in the
heavens, but could no longer hear its joyous notes. In a few weeks more
the nightingale, and even the loud thrush, became silent birds to my
doomed ears. My last effort to resist my own deafness was made at my
bedroom window. For some time I still heard, faintly and more faintly,
the shrill twittering just above me, under the eaves of the house. When
this last poor enjoyment came to an end--when I listened eagerly,
desperately, and heard nothing (think of it, _nothing!_)--I gave up the
struggle. Persuasions, arguments, entreaties were entirely without effect
on me. Reckless what came of it, I retired to the one fit place for
me--to the solitude in which I have buried myself ever since.

VIII

"With some difficulty, I discovered the lonely habitation of which was in
search.

"No language can describe the heavenly composure of mind that came to me,
when I first found myself alone; living the death-in-life of deafness,
apart from creatures--no longer my fellow-creatures--who could hear:
apart also from those privileged victims of hysterical impulse, who wrote
me love-letters, and offered to console the 'poor beautiful deaf man' by
marrying him. Through the distorting medium of such sufferings as I have
described, women and men--even young women--were repellent to me alike.