ret joy; then he
observes the name and address and his solemn conviction that he is an
honest man does the rest. After my experience to-day, I think I will
engrave my name on my umbrella. But not on that baggy thing standing in the
corner. I do not care who relieves me of that. It is anybody's for the
taking.

ON TALKING TO ONE'S SELF

I was at dinner at a well-known restaurant the other evening when I became
aware that some one sitting alone at a table near by was engaged in an
exciting conversation with himself. As he bent over his plate his face was
contorted with emotion, apparently intense anger, and he talked with
furious energy, only pausing briefly in the intervals of actual
mastication. Many glances were turned covertly upon him, but he seemed
wholly unconscious of them, and, so far as I could judge, he was unaware
that he was doing anything abnormal. In repose his face was that of an
ordinary business man, sane and self-controlled, and when he rose to go his
agitation was over, and he looked like a man who had won his point.

It is probable that this habit of talking to one's self has a less sinister
meaning than it superficially suggests. It may be due simply to the energy
of one's thought and to a concentration of mind that completely shuts out
the external world. In the case I have mentioned it was clear that the man
was temporarily detached from all his surroundings, that he was so absorbed
by his subject that his eyes had ceased to see and his ears to hear. He was
alone with himself, or perhaps with his adversary, and he only came back to
the present with the end of his dinner and the paying of his bill. He was
like a man who had emerged from another state of consciousness, from a
waking sleep filled with tumultuous dreams. Obviously he was unaware that
he had been haranguing the room in quite an audible voice for half an hour,
and I daresay that if he were told that he had the habit of talking to
himself he would deny it as passionately as you (or I) would deny that you
(or I) snore in our sleep. And he would deny it for precisely the same
reason. He doesn't know.

And here a dreadful thought assails me. What if I talk to myself, too? What
if, like this man, I get so absorbed in the drama of my own mind that I
cannot hear my own tongue going nineteen to the dozen? It is a disquieting
idea. A strong conviction to the contrary, I see, amounts to nothing. This
man, doubtless, had a strong convict