the passion of envy had no place
in our hearts, except in the case of Arch Fuqua--the other one's
brother. Of course we all went barefoot in the summer-time. Arch Fuqua
was about my own age--ten or eleven. In the winter we could stand him,
because he wore shoes then, and his great gift was hidden from our sight
and we were enabled to forget it. But in the summer-time he was a
bitterness to us. He was our envy, for he could double back his big toe
and let it fly and you could hear it snap thirty yards. There was not
another boy in the school that could approach this feat. He had not a
rival as regards a physical distinction--except in Theodore Eddy, who
could work his ears like a horse. But he was no real rival, because you
couldn't hear him work his ears; so all the advantage lay with Arch
Fuqua.

I am not done with Dawson's school; I will return to it in a later
chapter.

[_Dictated at Hamilton, Bermuda, January 6, 1907._] "That reminds me."
In conversation we are always using that phrase, and seldom or never
noticing how large a significance it bears. It stands for a curious and
interesting fact, to wit: that sleeping or waking, dreaming or talking,
the thoughts which swarm through our heads are almost constantly,
almost continuously, accompanied by a like swarm of reminders of
incidents and episodes of our past. A man can never know what a large
traffic this commerce of association carries on in our minds until he
sets out to write his autobiography; he then finds that a thought is
seldom born to him that does not immediately remind him of some event,
large or small, in his past experience. Quite naturally these remarks
remind me of various things, among others this: that sometimes a
thought, by the power of association, will bring back to your mind a
lost word or a lost name which you have not been able to recover by any
other process known to your mental equipment. Yesterday we had an
instance of this. Rev. Joseph H. Twichell is with me on this flying trip
to Bermuda. He was with me on my last visit to Bermuda, and to-day we
were trying to remember when it was. We thought it was somewhere in the
neighborhood of thirty years ago, but that was as near as we could get
at the date. Twichell said that the landlady in whose boarding-house we
sojourned in that ancient time could doubtless furnish us the date, and
we must look her up. We wanted to see her, anyway, because she and her
blooming daughter of eighteen were th