I once thought I had landed a job as stock chaser in a factory, but here, too, stammering barred the way, for they told me that even the stock chaser had to be able to deliver verbal messages from one foreman to another.  I didn’t dare to try that.

Eventually, I drifted around to the Union News Company.  They wanted a boy to sell newspapers on trams running out over the Grand Trunk Railway.  I took the job—­the last job in the world I should have expected to hold, because of all the places a newsboy’s job is one where you need to have a voice and the ability to talk.

I hope no stammerer ever has a position that causes him as much humiliation and suffering as that job caused me.  You can imagine what it meant to me to go up and down the aisles of the train, calling papers and every few moments finding out that I couldn’t say what I started out to say and then go gasping and grunting down the aisle making all sorts of facial grimaces.

How the passengers laughed at me!  And how they made fun of me and asked me all sorts of questions just to hear me try to talk.  It almost made me wish I could never see a human being again, so keen was the suffering and so tense were my nerves as a result of this work.

I don’t believe I ever did anything that kept me in a more frenzied mental state than this work of trying to sell newspapers —­and it wasn’t very long (as I had expected) until the manager found out my situation and gently let me out.

Then I gave up, all at once.  Was I discouraged?  Well, perhaps.  But not exactly discouraged.  Rather I saw the plain hopelessness of trying to get or hold a job in my condition.  So I prepared to go home.  I didn’t want to do it, because I knew the neighbors and friends round about would be ready for me with, “I told you so” and “I knew it couldn’t be done” and a lot of gratuitous information like that.

But I gave up, nevertheless, deeply disappointed to think that once again I had failed to be cured of stammering, yet all the while resolving just as firmly as ever that I would try again and that I would never give up hope as long as there remained anything for me to do.

And this rule I followed out, month after month and year after year, until in the end I was richly rewarded for my patience and persistence.

CHAPTER V

FURTHER FUTILE ATTEMPTS TO BE CURED

The next summer I decided to visit eastern institutions for the cure of stammering and determine if these could do any more for me than had already been done-which as the reader has seen, was practically nothing.  I bought a ticket for Philadelphia, where I remained for some time, and where I gained more information of value than in all of my previous efforts combined.

I found in the Quaker City an old man who had made speech defects almost a life study.  He knew more about the true principles of speech and the underlying fundamentals in the production of voice than all of the rest put together.  He taught me these things, and gave me a solid foundation on which to build.  True, he did not cure my stammering.  But that was not because he failed to understand its cause, but merely because he had not worked out the correct method of removing the cause.