yant; a mail-order scheme; the world's greatest speech specialist-so-called, and several other things. My parents had spent hundreds of dollars of money trying to have me cured. They had spared no

foolish indeed, in going to first one man and then another, trying to be cured. "Wouldn't it have

d 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

ve been better off if I had listened to the advice and stayed at home? Everything seemed to answer "Yes," but down in my heart

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

or no

the qu

nearly resigned to a life without fluent speech, nearly convinced that future eff

ent 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 wor

o scientific training, to cure myself, when the learned doctors, su

on 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 of his sailing 'over the edge.' Of course, it had never been done before, but then Columbus went ahead and did it himself. He didn't

proof that things can't be done at all. Now you've got a mighty good start. You've found out all about these other methods-you know that they h

LEAVE OFF AND FIND OUT HOW TO SUCCEED!" I kept saying it over and over to

o succeed." I kept thinking about that all the way home. I thought of it at the table that evening. I said nothing. I went to bed-but

!!" Then and there I determined to master the principles of speech, to chart the methods that had been used by others, to find their defects, to locate the ca

or elocution teachers or hypnotists to cure me of stammering. I was looking to myself. If I was to be cured, then I must be the one to do it. This responsibility sobered me. It intensified my determi