“Yes,” I cried eagerly, “of course. You don’t know how happy you made me by what you said. She is to keep it, isn’t she, Bob Hopley?”
“Well,” said the big fellow, holding the little watch carefully and admiringly in his great brown hand,—“well, seeing, my lass, how it’s give, and why it’s give, and who give it, and so on, I almost think you might.”
Chapter Thirty Two.
A man once said to me that our brains are very much like a bee’s honeycomb, all neat little cells, in which all our old recollections are stored up ready for use when we want them. There lie all our adventures and the results of all our studies, everything we have acquired in our lives.
Perhaps he was right—I don’t know—I never saw my brains; but, if he is, some of us have got the cells so tightly packed together, and in so disorderly a way, that when we want some special thing which we learned, we cannot find it; it is so covered up, so buried, that it is quite hopeless to try and get at it. This is generally the case with me, and, consequently, there are no end of school adventures during my long stay at “Old Browne’s” that I cannot set down here, for the simple reason that I cannot get at them, or, if I do, I find that the cell is crushed and the memory mixed up all in a muddle with wax.
I suppose I did not pack them into the comb properly. Oddly enough, my recollections are clearest about the part of my days which preceded the trouble over the watch.
After that, life seemed to go on at such a rapid rate that there was not time to put all the events away so that they could be found when wanted for further use.
Still, I recall a few things which preceded my leaving the school for Woolwich.