he
rapid talk of an afternoon caller on the family, and see how the
conversation skips from one subject to another which the last suggested,
and from that to another suggested by this, and so on.

Just this association of ideas it is which enables us to recall things
we have forgotten. Our ideas on any subject--say that sleigh-ride last
winter--resemble a lot of balls some distance apart in a room, but all
connected by strings. If there is any particular ball we cannot
find,--that is, some fact we cannot remember,--then if we pull the
neighboring balls it is likely that they by the connecting strings will
bring the missing ball into sight. To illustrate this, suppose that you
cannot remember the route of that sleigh-ride. You recall carefully all
the circumstances associated with the ride, in hopes that some one of
them will suggest the route that was taken. You think of your
companions, of the moon being full, of having borrowed extra robes, of
the hot bricks--Ah, there is a clue! The bricks were reheated somewhere.
Where was it? They were placed on a stove,--on a red-hot stove with a
loafers' foot-rail about it. That settles it. Such stoves are found only
in country grocery-stores; and now it all comes back to you. The ride
was by the hill road to Smith's Corners. It is as if there were a string
from the hot-bricks idea to the idea that the bricks were reheated, to
this necessarily being done on a stove, to the peculiar kind of stove it
was done on, to the only place in the neighborhood where such a stove
could be, to Smith's Corners; and this string has led you, like a clue,
to the fact you desired to remember.

We can now return to the question asked above: In trying to recall
names, why is it so difficult to find a clue? After what has been said,
the question can be put in a better form: Why does not the association
of ideas enable us to recall names as it does other things? The answer
is, that names (proper names) have very few associations, very few
strings, or clues, leading to them. It is easy to see this; for suppose
you moved away from the neighborhood of that sleigh-ride many years
before, and in thinking over past times find yourself unable to recall
the name of the Corners where the store stood. The place can be
remembered perfectly, and a thousand circumstances connected with it,
but they furnish no clue to the name: the circumstances might all remain
the same and the name be any other as well. The only