-called,
and several other things. My parents had spent hundreds of dollars of
money trying to have me cured. They had spared no effort, stopped at no
cost. And yet I now stammered worse than I had ever stammered before.
Everything I had tried had been a worthless failure. Nothing had been
of the least permanent good to me. My money was gone, months of time
had been wasted and I now began to wonder if I had not been very
foolish indeed, in going to first one man and then another, trying to
be cured. "Wouldn't it have been better," I asked, "if I had resigned
myself to a life as a stammerer and let it go at that?"

My father before me stammered. So did my grandfather and no less than
fourteen of my blood relations. My affliction was inherited and
therefore supposedly incurable. At least so I was told by honest
physicians and other scientific observers who believed what they said
and who had no desire to make any personal gain by trafficking in my
infirmity. These men told me frankly that their skill and knowledge
held out no hope for me and advised me from the very beginning to save
my money and avoid the pitfalls of the many who would profess to be
able to cure me.

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 res