bsent-minded men, of whom I am chief. Think of the gain alike in
serenity and force of intellect enjoyed by the man who sits down to work
absolutely free from that accursed cloud on the mind of things he has
got to remember to do, and can only avoid totally forgetting by wasting
tenfold the time required finally to do them in making sure by frequent
rehearsals that he has not forgotten them! The only way that one of
these trivialities ever sticks to the mind is by wearing a sore spot in
it which heals slowly. If a man does not forget it, it is for the same
reason that he remembers a grain of sand in his eye. I am conscious that
my own mind is full of cicatrices of remembered things, and long ere
this it would have been peppered with them like a colander, had I not
a good while ago, in self-defense, absolutely refused to be held
accountable for forgetting anything not connected with my regular
business.

While firmly believing my course in this matter to have been justifiable
and necessary, I have not been insensible to the domestic odium which
it has brought upon me, and could but welcome a device which promised to
enable me to regain the esteem of my family while retaining the use of
my mind for professional purposes.

As the most convenient conceivable receptacle of hasty memoranda of
ideas and suggestions, the indispensable also most strongly commended
itself to me as a man who lives by writing. How convenient when a flash
of inspiration comes to one in the night-time, instead of taking cold
and waking the family in order to save it for posterity, just to whisper
it into the ear of an indispensable at one's bedside, and be able to
know it in the morning for the rubbish such untimely conceptions usually
are! How often, likewise, would such a machine save in all their first
vividness suggestive fancies, anticipated details, and other notions
worth preserving, which occur to one in the full flow of composition,
but are irrelevant to what is at the moment in hand! I determined that I
must have an indispensable.

The bookstore, when we arrived there, proved to be the most
extraordinary sort of bookstore I had ever entered, there not being a
book in it. Instead of books, the shelves and counters were occupied
with rows of small boxes.

"Almost all books now, you see, are phono-graphed," said Hamage.

"The change seems to be a popular one," I said, "to judge by the crowd
of book-buyers." For the counters were, indeed,