Note 29 — Chapter II · GLENLAIR—CHILDHOOD—1831 TO 1841.

From his earliest manhood his ear for music was remarkably fine and discriminating, a fact (though in strict accordance with “heredity”) which surprised some of those who had known him as a boy. He has told me that he remembered a time when it was exquisitely painful to him to hear music. This time must clearly have been subsequent to 1837. The truth seems to be that his naturally keen perception of sounds was interfered with by a tendency to inflammation in the ear, which came to a crisis in his sixteenth year, but that having outgrown this together with other signs of delicacy, his powers in this respect also were developed with striking rapidity. On the other hand, his shortsightedness seems hardly to have been noticed till he was fourteen or fifteen.