At last I got a chance of speaking to another doctor about little Mary; and he told me that if we had kept her up in her speaking ever so severely, it would still have been a pain and a difficulty to her to say her words, to her dying day.

He said too, that he felt sure--though he couldn't explain it to me--that people afflicted with such stone deafness as hers didn't feel the loss of speech, because they never had the want to use their speech; and that they took to making signs, and writing, and such like, quite kindly as a sort of second nature to them.

This comforted me, and settled my mind a good deal.

I hope in God what the gentleman said was true; for if I was in fault in letting her have her own way and be happy, it's past mending by this time.

For more than two years, ma'am, I've never heard her say a single word, no more than if she'd been born dumb, and it's my belief that all the doctors in the world couldn't make her speak now.
"Perhaps, sir, you might wish to know how she first come to show her tricks on the cards in the circus.