26 MEMORY. 



picture. Think of the numberless people with 

 whom one has travelled by rail or sea, and whose 

 personality one can still more or less faintly re- 

 produce to one's self. An excellent test for the 

 enormous mass of human beings one can thus 

 readily remember is to take a single summer holi- 

 day, spent in an unfamiliar town or village, and 

 recall mentally all the people of whom one has 

 still a definite recollection. There was the boy 

 who lielped down the luggage from the cab ; and 

 there was Mrs. Smith, the obliging hostess ; and, 

 there was the bent old man who sat in the bar; 

 and there was the fat landlord wlio discussed [)oli- 

 tics over his glass of toddy; there was Sullivan, 

 the boatman, who had once been a coast guard ; 

 and there was the rosy-faced rector, wlio preached 

 on Sunday; and there were the rector's five pretty 

 daughters; and there was the pale curate who 

 was so much snubbed by the youngest and pretti- 

 est of tliem. Why, it isn't difiicult (we speak by 

 book) to remember a hundred and fifty distinct 

 persons all connected with those short three days 

 at a seaside watering-place ! And, when we come 

 to multiply such instances by tlie hundred or the 

 thousand, we see at once how vast and varied is 

 the number of individual human beings held in 

 memory by ever}"" ordinary modern man. 



Equally astonishing, when one comes to look at 

 the matter closely, is the immense variety of 



