"What! when you repeated it with so much facility yesterday! explain yourself."
"I do not know how it is," she replied, "that though I can learn with the utmost precision, mechanically, whatever I choose, in a short time, yet under such circumstances my memory has not the power of retention. If my train of repetition had been interrupted for one moment yesterday, I should have failed utterly."
"What were you looking at so intently the whole time?"
"I was looking at certain objects about the yard and house in connection with which I had studied the speech the evening before."
"Yes; but you certainly can repeat some portion of it to me?"
"Not one sentence connectedly; it has all passed from my mind like a shadow on the wall."
Yet she was a girl of good judgment, read much, talked well, and possessed in an eminent degree the indispensable requisite of a good memory—power of attention.