THE EAR WE CANNOT SEE 99 



again ; yet he was deaf for weeks afterwards. He could 

 not hear his own watch tick, while any one who talked 

 to him had to shout. I told him he must make up his 

 mind never to take another cold, for at this rate he would 

 be perfectly deaf after a while. 



Even people who hear very well do not always hear 

 the same things in the same way. If you should go into 

 the woods when the birds are singing, you would prob- 

 ably hear a great confusion of sounds and songs ; perhaps 

 you would not know one song from another; whereas, 

 in the same woods, a man who had trained his hearing 

 for bird songs might say, " I hear the voices of a dozen 

 different birds that I know." And then he would give 

 you their names, robin, bluebird, flicker, goldfinch, and 

 all the others. 



One of the most astonishing things about our hearing 

 is that we can make it careful or careless by the way we 

 use our ears. Listen carefully to a new song or a new 

 piece of music and you will learn it faster. Separate the 

 noises on the city street every day, and you will learn to 

 know each sound by itself. The more carefully we listen, 

 the better we remember; and the better we remember, 

 the more we enjoy what we hear. 



Thus one thing helps another: teach yourself to 

 listen to sounds and you will surprise yourself and your 

 friends by the way you remember them. 



