128

LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

about a trifling letter he had received seven years before, he was
pretty sure to deliver you the entire screed from memory. And then
without observing that he was departing from the true line of his
talk, he was more than likely to hurl in a long-drawn parenthetical
biography of the writer of that letter ; and you were lucky indeed if
he did not take up that writer's relatives, one by one, and give you
their biographies, too.

Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occur-
rences are of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an inte-
resting circumstance from
an uninteresting one. As
a talker, he is bound to
clog his narrative with
tiresome details and make
himself an insufferable
bore. Moreover, he cannot
Y stick to his subject. He

picks up every little grain
of memory he discerns in
his way, and so is led aside.
Mr. Brown would start
out with the honest in-
tention of telling you a
vastly funny anecdote
about a dog. He would
be ' so full of laugh ' that
he could hardly begin;
then his memory would

start with the dog's breed and personal appearance; drift into a
history of his owner; of his owner's family, with descriptions cf
weddings and burials that had occurred in it, together with recitals
of congratulatory verses and obituary poetry provoked by the same:
then this memory would recollect that one of these events occurred
during the celebrated ' hard winter ' of such and such a year, and a
minute description of that winter would follow, along with the names
of people who were frozen to death, and statistics showing the high
figures which pork and hay went up to. Pork and hay would suggest

*SO FULL OF LATTG-H.'