bought a ticket for home and boarded the train more nearly convinced
than ever that I had an incurable case of stammering.

Some time after trying my experiment with the eastern schools, I saw
the advertisement of a professor from Chicago saying that he would be
at Fort Wayne, Indiana, (which was 40 miles from my home), for a week.

He was there. So was I. But to my sorrow. I paid him twenty dollars for
which he taught me a few simple breathing and vocal exercises, most of
which I already knew by heart, having been drilled in them time and
again. This fellow was like so many others who claimed to cure
stammering--he was in the business just because there were stammerers
to cure, and not because he knew anything about it. He treated the
effects of the trouble and did not attempt to remove the cause. The
fact of the matter is, I doubt whether he knew anything about the cause.

Then one Sunday while reading a Cincinnati Sunday newspaper, I ran
across an advertisement of a School of Elocution, in which was the
statement, "Stammering Positively Cured!" Whenever I saw a sign "Vocal
Culture" I became interested, so I clipped the advertisement,
corresponded with the school and not many Sundays later, being able to
secure excursion rates to Cincinnati, I made the trip and prepared to
begin my work.

The cost of the course was only fifty dollars and I thought I would be
getting cured mighty cheap if I succeeded. So I gave this school a
"whirl" with the idea of going hack home in a short time cured--to the
surprise of my family and friends. But I was doomed to disappointment.
I took the twenty lessons, but went home stammering as badly as ever.
You can imagine how I felt as the Big Four train whistled at the Wabash
river just before pulling into the Wabash station, where I was to get
off.

Here was another failure that could be checked up against the
instructor who knew nothing whatever about the cause of stammering. The
whole idea of the course was to cultivate voice and make me an orator.
That was very fine and would, no doubt, have done me a great deal of
good, but it was of no use to try to cultivate a fine voice until I
could use that voice in the normal way. The finest voice in the world
is of no use if you stammer, and cannot use it. The school of elocution
went the same way as all the rest--it was a total failure so far as
curing my stammering was concerned.

By this time, my effort to be cured of stammering had beco