But I had disregarded this honest advice, sincerely given, had
spent my money and my time--and what had I gotten? Would I not
have been better off if I had listened to the advice and stayed at
home? Everything seemed to answer "Yes," but down in my heart I
felt that things were better as they were. Certainly some good
must come of all this effort--surely it could not all be wasted.

"But yet," I argued with myself, "what good can come of it?"
Stammering was fast ruining my life. It had already taken the joy
out of my childhood and had made school a task almost too heavy to
be undertaken. It had marked my youth with a somber melancholy,
and now that youth was slipping away from me with no hope that the
future held anything better for me than the past. Something had to
be done. I was overpowered by that thought--something had to be
done. It had to be done at once. I had come to the turning point
in my life. Like Hamlet, I found myself repeating over and over
again,

"To be or not to be,
That is the question."

Was I discouraged? No, I will not admit that I was discouraged,
but I was pretty nearly resigned to a life without fluent speech,
nearly convinced that future efforts to find a cure for stammering
would be fruitless and bring no better results.

It was about this time that I stepped into the office of my
cousin, then a successful lawyer and district attorney of his
city, later the first vice-president of one of the great American