ve its whole blazing interest to that ancient incident.

O.M. What was the incident?

Y.M. An armed desperado slapped my face in the presence of twenty
spectators. It makes me wild and murderous every time I think of it.

O.M. Good tests, both; very good tests. Did you try my other suggestion?

Y.M. The one which was to prove to me that if I would leave my mind to
its own devices it would find things to think about without any of my
help, and thus convince me that it was a machine, an automatic machine,
set in motion by exterior influences, and as independent of me as it
could be if it were in some one else's skull. Is that the one?

O.M. Yes.

Y.M. I tried it. I was shaving. I had slept well, and my mind was very
lively, even gay and frisky. It was reveling in a fantastic and joyful
episode of my remote boyhood which had suddenly flashed up in my
memory--moved to this by the spectacle of a yellow cat picking its
way carefully along the top of the garden wall. The color of this
cat brought the bygone cat before me, and I saw her walking along the
side-step of the pulpit; saw her walk on to a large sheet of sticky
fly-paper and get all her feet involved; saw her struggle and fall
down, helpless and dissatisfied, more and more urgent, more and more
unreconciled, more and more mutely profane; saw the silent congregation
quivering like jelly, and the tears running down their faces. I saw
it all. The sight of the tears whisked my mind to a far distant and a
sadder scene--in Terra del Fuego--and with Darwin's eyes I saw a naked
great savage hurl his little boy against the rocks for a trifling fault;
saw the poor mother gather up her dying child and hug it to her breast
and weep, uttering no word. Did my mind stop to mourn with that nude
black sister of mine? No--it was far away from that scene in an instant,
and was busying itself with an ever-recurring and disagreeable dream of
mine. In this dream I always find myself, stripped to my shirt, cringing
and dodging about in the midst of a great drawing-room throng of finely
dressed ladies and gentlemen, and wondering how I got there. And so on
and so on, picture after picture, incident after incident, a drifting
panorama of ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind
without any help from me--why, it would take me two hours to merely name
the multitude of things my mind tallied off and photographed in fifteen
minutes, let alone describe them to you.

O.M.