wen, "even if the
connecting links were so subtle and swiftly moved that you failed to
detect their presence."

"Are you of the Materialist school, Owen, about memory?" said Julian,
"_i e_, do you go with Hobbes and Condillac, and make it a decaying
sense or a transformed sensation?"

"Not a bit; I believe it to be a spiritual faculty, entirely independent
of mere physical organisation."

"Wo-ho!" said Kennedy; "the physiologists will join issue with you
there. How for instance do you account for such stories as that of the
groom, who, getting a kick on a particular part of the head from a
vicious horse, suffered no harm except in forgetting everything which
had happened _up to that time_?"

"It isn't a bit conclusive. I don't say that the conscious exercise of
memory mayn't be temporarily dependent on organisation, but I do believe
that every fact ever imprinted on the memory, however long it may be
latent, is of its very nature imperishable."

"Yes," said Suton. "Memory is the book of God. Did you see that story
of the shipwreck the other day? One of the survivors, while floating
alone on the dark midnight sea, suddenly heard a voice saying to him
distinctly, `Johnny, did you eat sister's grapes?' It was the revived
memory of a long-forgotten childish theft. What have the
Pineal-Gland-olaters to say to that?"

"What a profound touch that was of Themistocles," said Kennedy, "who
rejected the offer of a Memoria Technicha, with the aspiration that some
one could _teach him to forget_. Lethe is the grandest of rivers after
all."

"I can illustrate what you are saying," said Brogten, "and I believe it
to be true that _nothing can be utterly forgotten_. Yesterday when you
saw me I had sunk twice, and when you rescued me I was insensible.
Strange things happened to my memory then!"

"Tell us," said all of them eagerly.

"Well, I believe it's an old story, but I'll tell you. When the first
agony of fear, and the sort of gulp of asphyxia was over, I felt as if I
was sinking into a pleasant sleep, surrounded by the light of green
fields--"

"Because the veins of the eye were bloodshot, and green is the
complementary colour," interpolated Kennedy, whereat Owen gave a little
incredulous guffaw; and Brogten continued--

"Well, _then_, it was that all my past life flashed before me, from the
least forgotten venial fault of infancy to the worst passion of youth,--
only they came to me clear and vivid, in _re