association the
name has is with an indistinct memory of how it sounded. It was of two
words: the second was something like Hollow, or Cross roads, or
Crossing; the first began with an _S_. But it is vain to seek for it: no
clue leads to it. Were it the ride you sought to remember, many of its
details could be recalled, some of which might lead to the desired fact;
but a name has no details, and it is only possible to say of it that it
sounded so and so, if it is possible to say that.

It may be asked, how, then, is it that we do remember some names, as
those in use every day? Just as the multiplication-table is
remembered,--by force of familiarity. Constant repetition engraves them
in the mind. When in old age the vigor of the mind lessens, the
engraving wears out and names are hard to recall, since there is no
other clue to them than this engraved record.

There may be mentioned one slight help in recalling names when the case
is important or desperate. It consists in going back to the period when
the name was known and deliberately writing out a circumstantial
account of all the connected incidents, mentioning names of persons and
places whenever they can be remembered. If this is done in a casual way,
without thinking of the purpose in view,--as if one were sending a
gossipy letter of personal history to a friend,--the mind falls into an
automatic condition that may result in producing the desired name
itself. Every one must have observed that it is this automatic activity
of the mind, and not conscious effort, which recovers lost names most
successfully. We "think of them afterwards."

XENOS CLARK.

A Reminiscence of Harriet Martineau.

It is more than fifty years since I, a mere child, spent a summer with
my parents in a sandy young city of Indiana. Eight or nine hundred
souls, perhaps more, were already anchored within its borders. Chicago,
a lusty infant just over the line, her feet blackened with prairie mud,
made faces, called names, and ridiculed its soil and architecture.
Nevertheless it was a valiant little city, even though its streets were
rivers of shifting sand, through which "prairie-schooners" were
toilsomely dragged by heavy oxen or a string of chubby ponies,--these
last a gift from the coppery Indian to the country he was fast
forsaking. Clouds of clear grit drifted into open casements on every
passing breeze, or, if a gale arose, were driven through every crevice.
Our little city was cradle