NEW YORK—Yesterday I came up by plane to New York City. I was interested to find that between Washington and New York City there were a number of empty seats, so I think the young man was right who urged me not to give up travelling by plane, so long as I was willing to cope with some uncertainty.

I wasn't actually told I could have a seat until an hour before the plane left. However, I didn't have anything so vital to do for an hour after reaching New York City and a little uncertainty didn't matter.

Perhaps this period is going to teach us not to plan our lives on quite such tight schedules. After all, if we learn to use our time usefully wherever we are, it won't matter if we are held up a couple of hours by troop trains, or if we have to wait over for a couple of planes until there is an empty seat. Most of my life has been spent getting accustomed to doing one thing, and then finding I have to do something entirely different. This is going to be a new lesson and I hope a valuable one.

We had one guest at lunch yesterday. Then, via subway and train, I went to Orange, N. J., to spend the late afternoon and evening with my cousin, Mrs. Henry Parish and Mrs. Franklin K. Lane, who is still staying with her.

Even the little dog seemed to look expectantly for his master. The house and place out there, which Mr. Parish greatly loved, and where he planted almost every tree and shrub and flower, seemed rather deserted without him.

On the way back I happened to sit in the train next to Dr. Robert Searles and we were able to talk a little about the Wiltwyck School, which has been reorganized. I hope it is going to do a valuable piece of work for both colored and white children.

In my mail has come a letter from Dr. Morkovin, who is director of the Hearing Clinic of the University of Southern California. He writes that there are some three million hard-of-hearing children in this country, whose loss of hearing is discovered far too late for complete cure. This is largely due to the fact that mothers do not realize that complications which destroy hearing often arise after measles, whooping cough, infantile paralysis and other children's diseases.

Public opinion is indifferent to the fact that the hearing handicap may be a great deterrent to the development of the child. Therefore there are no state or federal agencies which care especially for hard-of-hearing children and they are not included in the benefits of the Crippled Children Act. If we know how much could be done, there would be a weight of public opinion in favor of watching for any signs of impaired hearing in small children.