Eventually, I drifted around to the Union News Company. They
wanted a boy to sell newspapers on trams running out over the
Grand Trunk Railway. I took the job--the last job in the world I
should have expected to hold, because of all the places a
newsboy's job is one where you need to have a voice and the
ability to talk.

I hope no stammerer ever has a position that causes him as much
humiliation and suffering as that job caused me. You can imagine
what it meant to me to go up and down the aisles of the train,
calling papers and every few moments finding out that I couldn't
say what I started out to say and then go gasping and grunting
down the aisle making all sorts of facial grimaces.

How the passengers laughed at me! And how they made fun of me and
asked me all sorts of questions just to hear me try to talk. It
almost made me wish I could never see a human being again, so keen
was the suffering and so tense were my nerves as a result of this
work.

I don't believe I ever did anything that kept me in a more
frenzied mental state than this work of trying to sell newspapers
--and it wasn't very long (as I had expected) until the manager
found out my situation and gently let me out.

Then I gave up, all at once. Was I discouraged? Well, perhaps. But
not exactly discouraged. Rather I saw the plain hopelessness of
trying to get or hold a job in my condition. So I prepared to go
home. I didn't want to do it, because I knew the neighbors and