isincline 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
secretly angry with them for making my infirmity conspicuous, and
directing the general attention to me. When other friends saw in my face
that I was not grateful to them, and gave up the attempt to help me, I
suspected them of talking of me contemptuously, and amusing themselves by
making my misfortune the subject of coarse jokes.

"Even when I deserved encouragement by honestly trying to atone for my
bad behavior, I committed mistakes (arising out of my helpless position)
which prejudiced people against me. Sometimes, I asked questions which
appeared to be so trivial, to ladies and gentlemen happy in the
possession of a sense of hearing, that they evidently thought me imbecile
as well as deaf. Sometimes, seeing the company enjoying an interesting
story or a good joke, I ignorantly appealed to the most incompetent
person present to tell me what had been said--with this result, that he
lost the thread of the story or missed the point of the joke, and blamed
my unlucky interference as the cause of it.

"These mortifications, and many more, I suffered patiently until, little
by little, my last reserves of endurance felt the cruel strain on them,
and failed me. My friends detected a change in my manner which alarmed
them. They took me away from London, to try the renovating purity of
country air.

"So far as any curative influence over the state of my mind was
concerned, the experiment proved to be a failure.

"I had secretly arrived at the conclusion that my deafness was
increasing, and that my friends knew it and were concealing it from me.
Determined to put my suspicions to the test, I took long solitary walks
in the neighborhood of my country home, and tri