the waves on the
beach and the muttering thunder pass harmless by him. How infinitely
strange it must be to have the sight of danger, but not the sound!
Fancy such a deprivation in war, for instance, where it is the sounds,
after all, that haunt the memory the longest; the rifle's crack, the
irregular shots of skirmishers, the long roll of alarm, the roar of
great guns. This man would have missed them all. Were a broadside from
an enemy's gunboat to be discharged above his head, he would not hear
it; he would only recognize, by some jarring of his other senses, the
fierce concussion of the air.

How much deeper seems his solitude than that of any other "lone fisher
on the lonely sea"! Yet all such things are comparative; and while the
others contrast that wave-tossed isolation with the cheeriness of home,
his home is silent too. He has a wife and children; they all speak, but
he hears not their prattle or their complaints. He summons them with
his fingers, as he summons the fishes, and they are equally dumb to
him. Has he a special sympathy with those submerged and voiceless
things? Dunfish, in the old newspapers, were often called "dumb'd
fish"; and they perchance come to him as to one of their kindred. They
may have learned, like other innocent things, to accept this defect of
utterance, and even imitate it. I knew a deaf-and-dumb woman whose
children spoke and heard; but while yet too young for words, they had
learned that their mother was not to be reached in that way; they never
cried or complained before her, and when most excited would only
whisper. Her baby ten months old, if disturbed in the night, would
creep to her and touch her lips, to awaken her, but would make no noise.

One might fancy that all men who have an agonizing sorrow or a fearful
secret would be drawn by irresistible attraction into the society of
the deaf and dumb. What awful passions might not be whispered, what
terror safely spoken, in the charmed circle round yonder silent
boat,--a circle whose centre is a human life which has not all the
susceptibilities of life, a confessional where even the priest cannot
hear! Would it not relieve sorrow to express itself, even if unheeded?
What more could one ask than a dumb confidant? and if deaf also, so
much the safer. To be sure, he would give you neither absolution nor
guidance; he could render nothing in return, save a look or a clasp of
the hand; nor can the most gifted or eloquent friendship d