and thanked him for his amiability in coming to make them an
address. She closed with the expression of the great joy it
gave her fellow-collegians, "because we all love you."

If any one here loves me, she has my sincere thanks. Nay, if any one
here is so good as to love me--why, I'll be a brother to her. She shall
have my sincere, warm, unsullied affection. When I was coming up in the
car with the very kind young lady who was delegated to show me the way,
she asked me what I was going to talk about. And I said I wasn't sure. I
said I had some illustrations, and I was going to bring them in. I
said I was certain to give those illustrations, but that I hadn't the
faintest notion what they were going to illustrate.

Now, I've been thinking it over in this forest glade [indicating the
woods of Arcady on the scene setting], and I've decided to work them in
with something about morals and the caprices of memory. That seems to
me to be a pretty good subject. You see, everybody has a memory and it's
pretty sure to have caprices. And, of course, everybody has morals.

It's my opinion that every one I know has morals, though I wouldn't like
to ask. I know I have. But I'd rather teach them than practice them any
day. "Give them to others"--that's my motto. Then you never have any
use for them when you're left without. Now, speaking of the caprices of
memory in general, and of mine in particular, it's strange to think
of all the tricks this little mental process plays on us. Here
we're endowed with a faculty of mind that ought to be more supremely
serviceable to us than them all. And what happens? This memory of ours
stores up a perfect record of the most useless facts and anecdotes and
experiences. And all the things that we ought to know--that we need
to know--that we'd profit by knowing--it casts aside with the careless
indifference of a girl refusing her true lover. It's terrible to think
of this phenomenon. I tremble in all my members when I consider all
the really valuable things that I've forgotten in seventy years--when I
meditate upon the caprices of my memory.

There's a bird out in California that is one perfect symbol of the
human memory. I've forgotten the bird's name (just because it would be
valuable for me to know it--to recall it to your own minds, perhaps).

But this fool of a creature goes around collecting the most ridiculous
things you can imagine and storing them up. He never selects