sonant sounds of nearly the same musical value.

It thus comes about that the deaf person will, when a soft consonant occurs in a sentence, substitute for it, mentally, the hard consonant sound most nearly resembling it, the consonant which would probably have been heard had it been used. In any given sentence, therefore, there are, to the very deaf, though seeing, persons, certain consonant sounds which are distinctly heard, others which are imperfectly heard, others which are detected by sight, and still others which are merely inferred.

In the higher grades of imperfection of hearing, therefore, both the effort to hear and the effort to see, combined, are inadequate to the presentation to the mind of the complete spoken sentence, since there remain gaps in the array of consonant sounds which must be filled in from the context; the completion of the sentence thus presented meaning the solution of a puzzle, and being therefore a third demand upon the nervous energy, in addition to those required through the medium of hearing and of sight.

In other words, the exercise of the ordinary communication with his fellow men demands of the person of imperfect hearing the operation of three distinct brain-processes to achieve that which is normally accomplished without conscious effort; and the resultant fatigue may be justly estimated as a possibly important factor in many cases of nervous over-strain.

But there are still other demands in the way of compensatory expenditure of nervous energy which make even a very little impairment of hearing a serious handicap in the race of life, among these being the difficulty in determination not only of the direction of a sound-source, but of the qualitative value of the sound as well, and a

distortion of the central sound-picture resulting from imperfection in hearing in one ear, the other ear being normal in function.

Since the head casts a sound-shadow, as it does a light-shadow, if one ear hears normally and the other ear but one half as much, there will be a marked difference in the sound-perception of a spoken sentence, according to the direction from which the sound proceeds; or, if there be, in the imperfect ear, an alteration of tension of its sound-transmitting apparatus, with corresponding accentuation of certain tones, the central adjustment of the distorted to the normal sound-picture requires a constant expenditure of energy to keep the concept true.

Still another demand upon the strength and endurance of the person with imperfect hearing is incident to the fact that an obstruction which hinders the passage of sound in one direction will equally hinder its passage in the opposite direction. If the cause of the deafness be an obstruction to the passage of sound through the middle ear from without inward, this obstruction will interfere with the normal passage outward of those sounds consequent upon the activity of the human machine: sounds made by the contraction of muscles, sounds incident to the movement of joints, and, more especially, the friction sounds made by the blood flowing through the bloodvessels, large and small, tones of low pitch for the former, and of high pitch for the latter.

Whether constant or intermittent, monotonous or variable, these circulation sounds have to be reckoned with in the adjustment of the compounded tone-picture to the uses of the day; and in their turn make a demand on the energy, expressed in judgment and self-control, of one who would keep the even tenor of his way.

Of all the external sounds which the human ear is capable of receiving and translating, that of the human voice is the most pregnant with meaning, and often the most difficult to interpret; and when that which, to the hard-of-hearing, is a distorted sentence is still further disfigured by imperfect or uneven utterance, the burden imposed by misfortune is made still more heavy by the carelessness of those who might help to lift it.

To the person, who, through imperfect hearing, has distinctly limited relationship with his fellow men, to the aged and the otherwise infirm, in whom the progressive contraction of the accommodative muscles within the drumhead has, by limiting the movement of the sound-transmitting apparatus, decreased the transmission of short sound-waves, and therefore the ability to hear truly the qualitative over-tones distinguishing the consonant sounds, there are two classes of speakers to be regarded with dread: those who articulate imperfectly, who may be said to be slovenly in speech; and those uneven speakers who, in a single sentence, rise to the fullness of their vocal capacity, and then sink to a whisper. The slovenly speaker demands of his hearer an acute attention and liberal translation, while the effort to follow the billowy lecturer may be compared to that of a lame man who is trying to keep his footing in a rocking boat.

One of the most effective helps which we can render those fellow travelers who find the fatigue of their deafness a daily load, is gentle speech, wellchosen, well-modulated, of an

even

tenor and, above all, articulate. When it is necessary to increase the voice volume, this should be done with due regard to the evenness of tone and the distinctness of articulation; to those who can receive only that which is ministeringly brought to them, to whom the once-accustomed volume of the sound of life has become pitiably diminished, let us bring in gentle mien, carefully, patiently, the best that we have to offer.

The majority of the human handicaps are more evident, and better understood, than is the impairment of hearing, which, without outward sign of disability, may first become of public knowledge as an obstacle to the conduct of the ordinary affairs of life and therefore as something to be contemned; a condemnation reflected often upon its unfortunate possessor, who finds himself thrust aside because he is apparently too slow to comprehend, or because the obstacle to be overcome in getting into touch with him, demands too great an effort in its surmounting.

Daily experiences of this sort, coupled often with the disappointment in the effort to live usefully and selfsustainingly, bring about a sense of isolation and of imprisonment, adding much to the fatigue and incident depression of the pitiably deaf; and while there are no apparent wounds to bind, there are gashes in the spirit and inroads upon the strength of our fellows who hear imperfectly, which make it incumbent upon us to halt a little in the hurry of the highway and give aid.

FROM the mazes of discussion in the modern novel it is sometimes most refreshing to go back to that earliest and purest form of narrative, the ballad, and to lose one's self in the delight of story as story. It is not that we are ungrateful for the complexities and the subtleties of our latter-day fiction, but that it is always wise in any study to turn back now and then to sources, and that in this case the effort takes one from troubled waters back to a clear and limpid stream.

They spared us their interpretations of human fate, for the most part, these forgotten ballad-makers, and sang simply of human lives, telling directly, objectively, that which happened, event and people growing real as the tale unfolded. They had power, perhaps lost now forever, of stirring the listener's feeling to the very depths, the appeal being made, not to one special faculty, but to the whole man, touching old chords of thought and of emotion, bringing dim memories to life, so that he who heard was made one with the story that was sung or told.

Always, in reading a good ballad, I stop for a moment, if only for a moment, to wonder why any other type of literature was ever devised, so satisfying is it in its haunting singleness of suggestion in regard to place, character, and incident. As much by what is left unsaid as by what is said, the imagination is set stirring. Like fair Janet, one

Fain would be at Carterhaugh Amang the leaves sae green, because of its compelling mystery, all

(W)

that we know of the place being suggested in the words quoted, and in those that tell of the red, red roses growing there. Could any study of individual character, could any arraignment of a hypocritical and fair-spoken type, be more complete than the bequest of Edward to his mother of his curse, for the evil counsels that have led him to crime? A whole drama is unfolded in those two lines, with total shock of surprise to the reader, and a whole unwritten romance is told in the last two lines of the "Wife of Usher's Well," as the youngest son says, at the close of that ghostly midnight visit between death and cock-crowing, —

And fare ye well, the bonny lass That kindles my mother's fire. One does not wish to reduce our elaborate and sophisticated modern novel to anything so primitive, but contact with this fresh and early form makes one realize in how many ways, sometimes admirably, sometimes atrociously, we depart from pure story, and many of the great achievements, as well as many of the shortcomings, of our fiction become apparent.

In facing the lengthy and complicated works before me, my first impression is of the astounding amount of information some of them contain. Here is a story, which, the announcements say, is the first one ever written about the fire-insurance business;1 a surprising plea, by the way, if one stops to recall the supposed nature of fiction.

1 White Ashes. By SIDNEY R. KENNEDY and ALDEN C. NOBLE. The Macmillan Co.