truck work, could have described them.
But he could not make himself out, nor how and why he came to be there
at all. Where ought he to have been, he asked himself? And, to his
horror, he could not make that out either. Never mind. Patience was
the word, clearly. Let him shut his eyes as he sat there, in the
little breakfast-room, with the flies continually droning in the
ceiling, and an especially large bluebottle busy in the window, who
might just as easily have gone out and enjoyed the last hour of a long
evening in a glorious sunshine, but who mysteriously preferred to beat
himself for ever against a closed pane of glass, a self-constituted
prisoner between it and a gauze blind--let him shut his eyes, and try
to think out what it all meant, what it was all about.

All that he was perfectly certain of, at that moment, was that he was
awake, with a contused pain all over, and a very stiff left hand and
foot. And that, knowing he had been insensible, he was striving hard
to remember what something was that had happened just before he became
insensible. He had nearly got it, once or twice. Yes, now he _had_ got
it, surely! No, he hadn't. It was gone again.

A mind that is struggling to remember some particular thing does not
deal with other possibilities of oblivion. We all know the painful
phenomenon of being perfectly aware what it is we are trying to
remember, feeling constantly close to it, but always failing to grasp
it. We know what it will sound like when we say it, what it will mean,
where it was on the page we read it on. Oh dear yes!--quite plainly.
The only thing we can't remember for the life of us is--what it _was_!

And while we are making stupendous efforts to recapture some such
thing, does it ever occur to any of us to ask if we may not be
mistaken in our tacit assumption that we are quite certain to remember
everything else as soon as we try? That, in fact, it may be our
memory-faculty itself that is in fault and that we are only failing to
recall one thing because at the moment it is that one sole thing, and
no other, that we are trying our brains against.

It was so in the pause of a few minutes in which this man we write of,
left to himself and the ticking of the clock, and hearing, through the
activity of the bluebottle and the monotony of the ceiling flies, the
murmur of a distant conversation between his late companions, who for
the moment had left him alone, tried in vain to recover his parti