MEMORY
Most of us forget to remember; it is harder, far, to remember to forget. And the more one endeavors to forget, the more memory insists.
"So you really think your memory is improving under treatment. You remember things now?"
"Well, not exactly, but I have progressed so far that I can frequently remember that I have forgotten something, if I could only remember what it is."
A school-teacher who had been telling a class of small pupils the story of discovery of America by Columbus, ended it with: "And all this happened more than six hundred years ago."
A little boy, his eyes wide open with wonder, said, after a moment's thought: "Gee, what a memory you've got!"
A Thing Forgotten
White owl is not gloomy;
Black bat is not sad.
It is only that each has forgotten
Something he used to remember:
Black bat goes searching . . . searching . . . .
White owl says over and over
Who? What? Where?
WALTER—"Mr. Smith's left his umbrella again. I do believe he would leave his head if it were loose."
ROBINSON—"I dare say you're right. I heard him say only yesterday he was going to Switzerland for his lungs."
Rose, the garrulous domestic, can give you facts of history—international, dramatic, scandalous—right off the bat without a moment's hesitation.
"How do you manage to remember all these things, Rose?" inquired her employer the other day.
Then Rose came back with the infallible rule for memory training.
"I'll tell ye, ma'am," says she. "All me life never a lie I've told. And when ye don't have to be taxin' yer memory to be rememberin' what ye told this one or that one, or how ye explained this or that, ye don't overwork it and it lasts ye, good as new, forever."
"What brought you here, my man?" asked the prison visitor.
"Just plain absent-mindedness," replied the prisoner.
"Why, how could that be?"
"I forgot to change the engine number of the car before I sold it."