A PHILANTHROPIC GENTLEMAN of good address, who has travelled a great deal, wishes to offer his addresses to impecunious young ladies (orphans preferred). Only those genuinely desirous of changing their residences, and with weak memories, need apply.
And now for the final and fatal "Eureka." The anxiety of some persons to hire out their memories for a period led O'Donovan to see that it was absurd for him to pay for the use of them. The owners were only too glad to dodge remorse. He hit on the sublime idea that they ought to pay him. The result was the following advertisement in In Memoriam and its contemporaries:—
AMNESIA AGENCY! O'Donovan's Anodyne. Cheap Forgetfulness—Complete or Partial. Easy Amnesia—Temporary or Permanent. Haunting Memories Laid! Consciences Cleared. Cares carefully Removed without Gas or Pain. The London address of Lethe is 1001, Strand. Don't forget it.
Quite a new class of customers rushed to avail themselves of the new pathological institution. What attracted them was having to pay. Hitherto they wouldn't have gone if you paid them, as O'Donovan used to do. Widows and widowers presented themselves in shoals for treatment, with the result that marriages took place even within the year of mourning—a thing which obviously could not be done under any other system. I wonder whether Geraldine—but let me finish now!
How well I remember that bright summer's morning when, wooed without by the liberal sunshine, and disgusted with the progress I was making with my new study in realistic fiction, I threw down my pen, strolled down the Strand, and turned into the Clearing House. I passed through the selling department, catching a babel of cries from the counter-jumpers—"Two gross anecdotes? Yes, sir; this way, sir. Half-dozen proposals; it'll be cheaper if you take a dozen, miss. Can I do anything more for you, mum? Just let me show you a sample of our innocent recollections. The Duchess of Bayswater has just taken some. Anything in the musical line this morning, signor? We have some lovely new recollections just in from impecunious composers. Won't you take a score? Good morning, Mr. Clement Archer. We have the very thing for you—a memory of Macready playing Wolsey, quite clear and in excellent preservation; the only one in the market. Oh, no, mum; we have already allowed for these memories being slightly soiled. Jones, this lady complains the memories we sent her were short."
"'TWO GROSS ANECDOTES?'"
O'Donovan was not to be seen. I passed through the Buying Department, where the employees were beating down the prices of "kind remembrances," and through the Hire Department, where the clerks were turning up their noses at the old memories that had been pledged so often, into the Amnesia Agency. There I found the great organiser peering curiously at a sensitised plate.
"Oh," he said, "is that you? Here's a curiosity."
"What is it?" I asked.