front of the Pullman window in Philadelphia. As always, I was conscious of my deafness. I rehearsed in my mind the form of application that would produce results as quickly as the time and place imperatively demanded. I decided to use a question which could be answered, 'Yes' or 'No.'

of living. As a class, they have one irritating quality. They confuse physical defects with mental. They think that a deaf person is obtuse. With this class, the rule of acknowledging deafness is defaulted to good advantage. Even if time permits the establishing of the new basis, what is the other

and resources, going to do? No, it is

'You mean a seat in a sleeping-car?'

No, that was n't it. The girl behind the grille, with just a touch of impatience, apparently repeated her original

statement.

I made one more attempt.
'You mean on another train?'

The answer to that was, unmistakably, 'No.' I took a sporting chance, laid down my money, and secured the customary folded green slip.

I awaited my train with only a slight misgiving. I had 'something' on the four o'clock train. I tendered my slip to the Pullman conductor, who took it and directed me to the club car. Of course. One more question, and I would have completed the circuit.

One who hears as unconsciously as he breathes is amazed at so complex a situation over so simple a transaction. But to the deafened these problems occur with monotonous frequency. It is his life. He must constantly match his wits against his deafness, to extract from the world the information necessary to carry on the business of living. No matter how well he does it, he never gets credit for the real mental agility shown. He is merely thought less deaf than he is.

So the technique begins with what might be called the friction of life, the constant colloquies with salespeople, clerks, ticket-agents, waiters, policemen, car-conductors, and others, who constitute, collectively, the machine

position as the provoker of the interview, to make the terms on which it is to be conducted, and to make them as favorable to yourself as possible.

Begin with the selection of the individual to be approached. This is not always possible. People behind grilles in banks, offices, and railway stations are fixtures that must be handled differently; but on the streets you may select the person to whom you put your question with as much care as a professional beggar. People of Latin extraction, for instance, always respond with a gesture. The Italian peanut-vender accompanies his volume of words with a gesture so eloquent that it almost deposits you at the door.

The second rule is to ask questions that can be answered, 'Yes' or 'No.' Yes and No are always recognizable. To be sure, the answer is sometimes 'No,' followed, of course, with the right information; but as a process of elimination, it works wonders. There are but few directions in which one can go. In a railroad station, pick out the most likely-looking train and say to the man in uniform, 'Is this the New York train?' If it is n't, then your list of trains is reduced by one. I am describing only desperate cases. You average much better than this. Sometimes you pick the right one the first time. Sometimes your informant points to the right one.

Perhaps I would better say right here that the deaf person always prepares

for as many emergencies as possible. He studies the time-table in advance. He reads the signs on the walls and in the train shed. He soon learns (and public-utility servants should bless him for this) never to ask an unnecessary question. I always buy a map of a strange city, in this country as well as in Europe. I learn it by heart. And as I walk proudly down a strange street, in an unfamiliar foreign city, I realize that I get on better than even my most acute-eared compatriots. It sounds like a lot of work, but not more than is necessary to play a good hand at bridge. And it is just as much fun.

I always inquire the price when shopping, for the moral effect on the salesman. In small shops I tender a bill that I know must be larger than the amount named. In big shops I read the sales-slip upside down, as the salesman makes it out. Also, in some stores the price is marked on the goods.

The menu card is now common enough to make ordering a meal comparatively easy. In country hotels, where the card is rattled off by a blonde person just abaft your weaker ear, I generally throw myself on the mercy of the waitress, and ask her to bring me what she thinks is best to-day, adding that I usually take coffee.

Before I cast off from the bell boy who pilots me to my room, I anticipate whatever I am going to want, and order it. The boy is instructed to enter without knocking when he brings it. Of course the night clerk cannot 'call' me; but I have learned to 'set' myself for any hour a trick not hard to learn. And the man who awoke several hours too late, and found a paper tucked beneath his door on which a considerate bell boy had written, 'Sir, it is six o'clock; get up,' was not even deaf.

These are but some of the shifts and devices with which I get through those hours when it is my destiny to be deaf.

Through all the complicated machinery of living, my subconscious mind is functioning in ways like these, automatically, just as you learn not to step on the top stair that is n't there.

To these few hours I must add the time spent in what the United States Census so delightfully calls a gainful occupation; and then I have all the rest of the day for myself, time off, to be deaf or not, just as I choose.

I have taken the deaf man's job for granted, as I am talking to those who have found a way to make a living, but are rather at loose ends as to what to do with the living when they have made it. My own job requires a good deal of hearing, but I have built up a machine to take care of it, something like that which mitigates my other contacts. I believe that most men who were not born deaf have got shaken down in some occupation, and have evolved the proper offensive and defensive mimicry, and are more concerned with things outside office-hours.

Nothing has been said so far about aids to hearing. It is just as well for the deaf to arrange their lives without dependence on these substitutes, and then get all the help out of them they can. The various forms of the telephone housed in little black boxes are a great help, especially in those necessary conversations by which the humbler part of living is carried on. I have one, in fact I have a whole flock of them, and I carry one with me, so far as the exigencies of life permit. I am frequently stopped at the doors of museums and galleries by the custodians, with 'Here, you gotta check that; photographing ain't allowed; it's let to a party.' But these instruments, while useful, do not take the place of ears, not even to the extent that glasses replace eyes.

Then there is lip-reading-a wonderful art, which some practise with a

dexterity that is little short of marvelous, and which all of us utilize to some extent. But it must be admitted that the good Lord has created few people with legible countenances.

What conversation the deaf man gets will be with one of these two substitutes. Only at rare intervals will he know that finest flower of civilization

real talk. He will find that, by a perfectly natural law, his friends are inevitably those who speak distinctly. He will never know the others well, however desirable they may be.

If he has become, by chance, a part of a social group, one of three courses is offered him. He may depend on an interpreter, one of those clear-speaking persons who will give him the leads; or he may interrupt with a topic evolved from his own insides, as the spider spins her web, and catch a few flies until the subject is changed again; or he may break off and segregate a unit of the group for a tête-à-tête, as one does at formal dinners.

It will not matter much. Most people are merely waiting for an opportunity to introduce their own topic, anyway; and a lot of casual conversation is merely amiable noises, greetings, inquiries that demand and expect no answer, obvious remarks about our common weather the deaf soon learn

to discount these. We can make amiable noises ourselves. Relevance and appositeness are not required, even between hearing people.

As you see, the fox makes out a good case for the percentage of acid in the grapes.

IV

And now we come to the most delightful phase of this art of being deaf. All that has gone before is but the dreary practising of scales, preliminary to playing a Hungarian Rhapsody, the reiterated 'keep your showlder down

VOL. 151 - NO. 1

and yer eye on the ba" of the professional, to be able to send a long drive down the centre of the fairwaytiresome but necessary.

I have found it worth while to make formal lists of the liabilities and assets in the way of recreation, so that I may know just where I stand; to separate those things in which hearing is essential from those where deafness is no bar, and where it may be even an advantage.

On my index expurgatorius are:-
Conversation in the best sense
The theatre

Lectures

Public dinners, and most private

ones

Music

Social dancing

Games like 'What is my thought like?'

Being read aloud to

I have left:

Books

Pictures, moving and stationary
Art, painting, sculpture, architec-
ture, and applied
Natural science
Scenery

Travel on foot, train, boat, horse,
and motor

Exhibition dancing, and all specta-
cles and pageants
Games like golf and whist
Nearly all hobbies

I add these two columns and strike a balance. When mitigations and compensations are added, the assets exceed the liabilities, and I am, from a happiness point of view, solvent.

Nor are all the liabilities total. I have often read a play in advance, and derived some entertainment from seeing it without hearing it. And in France and Italy I have done more. There I have an advantage over the visitor who does not understand the language. I get more out of the acting through my

long training in observation, the seeing eye, sharpened beyond anything Sherlock Holmes utilized. I saw Après l'Opéra at the Grand Guignol, and repeated the plot to my wife afterward. I had not missed an essential detail. This faculty adds immensely to the entertainment furnished by street scenes in continental cities this ability to see all there is, which many hearing people lack entirely.

Someone has said (Boy, page Mr. Bartlett) that when God closes one window, He opens another a little wider. I have tried to help Him and swing my window altogether open.

Just as soon as I realized that I was dependent entirely on myself for amusement, I took pains to equip myself with a number of self-contained, self-starting recreations. Indeed, every man should do at least one thing as different as possible from what he does for a living. If he has a white-collar, white-paper job, he should have also a hand-dirtying hobby. He should paint, model, carve, fish, dig - do something that will give him the feel of things, -earth or tools, - to make him a complete human being. But what is merely healthy balance for the normal man is essential for the deaf one. He is denied the harmless and amusing timekiller and space-filler that conversation is. He must be prepared with a number of things to take its place and give him the sense of a full life.

I have been unusually fortunate in this respect. I learned to play early in life, and I learned to use my imagination as the chief toy. My mother had little money for the 'boughten' kinds; but she had plenty of imagination, and my deafness taught me to depend on myself. (I wonder if even children know how to play nowadays.)

In consequence, I have never been bored, except by one thing. I thought at first that it was my duty to stick

around where conversation was being indulged in — before I made my great discovery and took a reprieve for life. It is the proper thing to urge the deaf to mingle with their fellows as much as possible, and try to hear. It is one of the most fatiguing things in the world, effort without result, like foozling one's drive. I gave it up. The price was too high. I really began to live when I realized this, and gave myself wholly to a deaf man's recreations.

And what are they? Printing is one. I learned the trade as a boy, followed it until I attained the proud eminence of a card in the Typographical Union, and thereby opened my little window a bit wider. I do not now work at it as a trade, having gone into another line (in which printing is a great help); but my knowledge gives me another interest in books, apart from reading them. I can look at a collection of rare books and taste the pleasures of a connoisseur. My name is on several of the committees of the Institute of Graphic Arts-of which I am a useless but enthusiastic member-simply as a tribute to my great love.

Some day this hobby will flower into a private press with a fancy name how would The Upwey Press sound? -and I will play with printing like Horace Walpole and Sir Egerton Brydges.

Meanwhile, I work in wood, with a lathe and carving tools. Woodworking shares with the outside of a horse the quality of being good for the inside of a man. It is a great soother. A woodcarver in Grand Rapids told a reporter who was wondering at the contented state of labor in the woodworking crafts that you had to have a good disposition to work on wood.

I make models of ancient ships. This opens wide a big door. There is the excuse for hunting old books and prints, to learn how they looked and were

rigged - books like Captain John Smith's Sea Grammar (London: John Haviland, 1627), or L'Art de Bâtir les Vaisseaux (Amsterdam: Chez David Mortier, 1719). I am a member of two societies, one in England and one in this country, whose members either collect or make these delightful bits of craftsmanship. The making calls for the exercise of many arts and, like one of De Morgan's books, it lasts a long time. And, when completed, it becomes, if one has been faithful, not only an historical document, but a bit of decoration as well.

I have a colony of bees, which are sufficiently amiable to permit me to take out the brood combs and find the queen, when there is someone to see me show off and exclaim, 'Don't they ever sting you?' I also battle with beetles and worms, for the satisfaction of raising a few of the varieties of roses.

a

If I play a rotten game of golf, it is not because I am deaf. There is no reason why a deaf man should not be very good golfer. With me it is, perhaps, because I enjoy a walk as much with a blackthorn stick in my hand as with a mashie. The city of New York has built me a beautiful walk, running beside my home, and extending many miles both north and south. This is the Ashokan Dam Aqueduct, on whose dorsal vertebræ I am free from the menace of the motor-car.

This list of mine does not represent any unusual ability or training. What little I know I learned from books.

There are few things one cannot learn from books, and the learning is part of the game. Books came first on my list, naturally, but little need be said about them here. It has all been said. Everything in the Booklover's Enchiridion about the value of books should be underscored for the deaf.

You may not care for reading. Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed his admiration for one who sweetly and honestly said, 'I hate books'; but he was n't deaf. However, a liking for books is not necessary to my scheme of salvation. Turn back to the list of permitted interests, and see how large is the choice. I have described my own diversions, merely to show that it can be done.

Do not get the idea that all this means dispensing with friends. Friendship is not conversation. The things the deaf can do to reclaim the waste places of his life, and find happiness in doing, have another rare quality. They are a substitute for conversation in a quite different way. They enable him to account for himself to others, to acquire a new interest in the eyes of his friends, to win a consideration that his amateur performance as a listener will not give.

Thus I find myself at fifty-four, busy and happy, with a very satisfactory 'expectancy' allowed by my insurance company, with a life packed full of the most exciting and enthralling things to do, and wondering whether I am going to have time- -even if I realize that expectancy-to do them all.