Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/253

 repeated by the entire body. If I did not catch every word, I can only say that it is but seldom that one can catch every word even when the prayer is uttered by a congregation more fortunately placed.

By way of contrast to this final experience at Margate, I lost no time on my return to town in attending the Deaf and Dumb Church in Oxford-street. Here the service is silent, and never was silence so eloquent. A congregation which gives expression to the prayers at its heart through the fingers, which sings hymns by signs, which follows a sermon not a word of which is spoken aloud, and a church without an organ and without a choir, are a novelty indeed. For two hours every Sunday morning and evening there is a service during which not a sound save a cough, or whisper from the altar, is to be heard. A strange feeling of incompetency comes over the visitor who is blessed with ears as he kneels, but only dimly comprehends the meaning of the prayer, as he stands up to a hymn which is not vocalised, as he regards the wonderful variety of motions by means of which the chaplain delivers a sermon some twenty minutes in length. The church is in charge of the Rev. Dr. William Stainer—the acting chaplain, as he facetiously styles himself—a brother of Sir John Stainer, the great musician. Curious it is that one should have made himself famous through the medium of sound and the other should have devoted himself to the world to which sound is a meaningless term. Dr. Stainer is one of the most self-sacrificing of men. Whilst this year is the centenary of the Old Kent-road Asylum, it is also the jubilee of Dr. Stainer's connection with the deaf and dumb. For fifty years he has laboured in their cause, and he has an ambition which few entertain but many realise. He wishes to die a poor man, and, seeing that a slice of his capital and a portion of his income go every year to the advancement of some work or other intended to benefit the deaf and dumb, he will certainly attain his ambition if he is spared. Dr. Stainer became a teacher in the Old Kent-road institution in 1842. Thence he migrated to Manchester, where there is one of the best deaf and dumb asylums in the world, and eventually he took holy orders for the sake of the afflicted. To write a record of his life would be to furnish more than one chapter in the history of the efforts made during the nineteenth century to ameliorate the lot of the deal and dumb. In 1872 he was appointed Chaplain of the Royal Society for the Deaf and Dumb in Oxford-street, the position he now holds, and in 1874 he was induced by the authorities of the School Board for London to take in hand the great work of providing for the education of the hundreds of deaf and dumb who were, on account of their infirmity, allowed to go uneducated. With this object he started centres of instruction for the deaf and dumb, and later a home where children who lived too far from any centre to attend daily might be kept from Monday to Friday. To-day there are several homes in London which owe their existence to the initial energy of Dr. Stainer. To these homes are chiefly sent pauper children, some of the inmates having been actually found wandering in gutters like stray dogs, abandoned by those whose parental instinct was not strong enough to teach them a duty which even the lower animals observe. Most people in London probably know of Dr. Stainer's homes in the Pentonville-road. Here one