ON THE ABEYANCE OF MEMORY. 163 



half-an-hour ; his life will have rolled back upon itself, 

 to the date when he was an undergraduate, and his 

 instinct will be to do almost mechanically, whatever it 

 would have come most natural to him to do, when he 

 was last there at the same season of the year, and the 

 same hour of the day ; and it is plain this is due to 

 similarity of environment, for if the place he revisits 

 be much changed, there will be little or no association. 

 So those who are accustomed at intervals to cross 

 the Atlantic, get into certain habits on board ship, 

 different to their usual ones. It may be that at home 

 they never play whist ; on board ship they do nothing 

 else all the evening. At home they never touch 

 spirits ; on the voyage they regularly take a glass of 

 something before they go to bed. They do not smoke 

 at home ; here they are smoking all day. Once the 

 voyage is at an end, they return without an effort to \«. 

 their usual habits, and do not feel any wish for cards, 

 spirits, or tobacco. They do not remember yesterday, 

 when they did want all these things ; at least, not 

 with such force as to be influenced by it in their 

 desires and actions ; their true memory — the memory 

 which makes them want, and do, reverts to the last 

 occasion on which they were in circumstances like 

 their present; they therefore want now what they 

 wanted then, and nothing more ; but when the time 

 comes for them to go on shipboard again, no sooner 

 do they smell the smell of the ship, than their real 

 memory reverts to the times when they were last at 

 sea, and striking a balance of their recollections, they 

 smoke, play cards, and drink whisky and water. 





