no one has been so enterprising as to wrest from its
actual inhabitants any particulars of their character and appearance.
And among educated experts and professional proponents of worlds to be
there is a general denial of its existence.

I am of their way of thinking about that. The fact that we have no
recollection of a former life is entirely conclusive of the matter. To
have lived an unrecollected life is impossible and unthinkable, for
there would be nothing to connect the new life with the old--no thread
of continuity--nothing that persisted from the one life to the other.
The later birth would be that of another person, an altogether different
being, unrelated to the first--a new John Smith succeeding to the late
Tom Jones.

Let us not be misled here by a false analogy. Today I may get a thwack
o' the mazzard which will give me an intervening season of
unconsciousness between yesterday and to-morrow. Thereafter I may live to
a green old age with no recollection of anything that I knew, or did, or
was before the accident; yet I shall be the same person, for between the
old life and the new there will be a _nexus_, a thread of continuity,
something spanning the gulf from the one state to the other, and the
same in both--namely, my body with its habits, capacities and powers.
That is I; that identifies me to others as my former self--authenticates
and credentials me as the person that incurred the cranial mischance,
dislodging memory.

But when death occurs _all_ is dislodged if memory is; for between two
merely mental or spiritual existences memory is the only _nexus_
conceivable; consciousness of identity is the only identity. To live
again without memory of having lived before is to live another.
Re-existence without recollection is absurd. There is nothing to
re-exist.

EMANCIPATED WOMAN

What I should like to know is, how "the enlargement of woman's sphere"
by her entrance into various activities of commercial, professional and
industrial life benefits the sex. It may please Helen Gougar and satisfy
her sense of logical accuracy to say, as she does: "We women must work
in order to fill the places left vacant by liquor-drinking men." But who
filled these places before? Did they remain vacant, or were there then
disappointed applicants, as now? If my memory serves, there has been no
time in the period that it covers when the supply of workers--abstemious
male workers--was not in excess of the deman