The Master of Silence

Kendric Lane is a boy apprenticed to a Liverpool cotton house when a deaf and dumb old man brings him a letter from an uncle who went to America before he was born, and dies in Kendric's bed before morning. Two years of searching end at a walled house on the St. Lawrence near Ogdensburg, where Revis Lane has raised his son Rayel from birth without a spoken word, to learn what a mind becomes in perfect silence; the young man paints what he has never seen and reads what others think. When the old man dies, Kendric must take Rayel into New York society, which has no idea what to do with him, while someone in England is quietly arranging Kendric's own death. Irving Bacheller, who founded one of the first American newspaper syndicates, published this, his first novel, in 1892. Fifty-six plates, among them canvases by Winslow Homer and Albert Bierstadt, carry the silence of woods, water, and watchful figures through the story's wordless world.