he measure of my disasters
was filled by an attack of illness which threatened me with death. My
medical advisers succeeded in saving my life--and left me to pay the
penalty of their triumph by the loss of one of my senses.

"At an early period of my convalescence, I noticed one day, with languid
surprise, that the voices of the doctors, when they asked me how I had
slept and if I felt better, sounded singularly dull and distant. A few
hours later, I observed that they stooped close over me when they had
something important to say. On the same evening, my day nurse and my
night nurse happened to be in the room together. To my surprise, they had
become so wonderfully quiet in their movements, that they opened the door
or stirred the fire, without making the slightest noise. I intended to
ask them what it meant; I had even begun to put the question, when I was
startled by another discovery relating this time to myself. I was certain
that I had spoken--and yet, I had not heard myself speak! As well as my
weakness would let me, I called to the nurses in my loudest tones. "Has
anything happened to my voice?" I asked. The two women consulted
together, looking at me with pity in their eyes. One of them took the
responsibility on herself. She put her lips close to my ear; the horrid
words struck me with a sense of physical pain: 'Your illness has left you
in a sad state, sir. You are deaf.'"

VII

"As soon as I was able to leave my bed, well-meaning people, in and out
of the medical profession, combined to torment me with the best
intentions.

"One famous aural surgeon after another came to me, and quoted his
experience of cases, in which the disease that had struck me down had
affected the sense of hearing in other unhappy persons: they had
submitted to surgical treatment, generally with cheering results. I
submitted in my turn. All that skill could do for me was done, and
without effect. My deafness steadily increased; my case was pronounced to
be hopeless; the great authorities retired.

"Judicious friends, who had been waiting for their opportunity, undertook
the moral management of me next.

"I was advised to cultivate cheerfulness, to go into society, to
encourage kind people who tried to make me hear what was going on, to be
on my guard against morbid depression, to check myself when the sense of
my own horrible isolation drove me away to my room, and, last but by no
means least, to beware of letting my vanity d