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 results.

It was about this time that I stepped into the office of my cousin, then a successful lawyer and district attorney of his city, later the first vice-president of one of the great American railroads with headquarters in New York, and now retired.  He was one of those men in whose vocabulary there is no such word as “fail.”  After I had talked with him for quite a while, he looked at me, and with his kindly, almost fatherly smile asked, “Why don’t you cure yourself?”

“Cure myself?” I queried.  “How do you expect me, a young man with no scientific training, to cure myself, when the learned doctors, surgeons and scientists of the country hare given me up as incurable?”

“That doesn’t make any difference,” he replied, “’while there is life, there is hope’ and it’s a sure thing that nobody ever accomplished anything worth while by accepting the failures of others as proof that the thing couldn’t be done.  Whitney would never have invented the cotton gin if he had accepted the failures of others as final.  Columbus picked out a road to America and assured the skeptics that there was no danger