his
imposture was that Lady Tichborne believed him to be her long-lost son. In
that case, no doubt, the maternal passion was the source of a credulity
that blinded the old lady to the flagrant evidence of the fraud.

But, generally speaking, our memory of other faces is extremely vague and
elusive. I have just come in from a walk with a friend of mine whom I have
known intimately for many years. Yet for the life of me I could not at this
moment tell you the colour of his eyes, nor could I give a reasonable
account of his nose or of the shape of his face. I have a general sense of
his appearance, but no absolute knowledge of the details, and if he were to
meet me to-morrow with a blank stare and a shaven upper lip I should pass
him without a thought of recognition.

Memory, in fact, is largely reciprocal, and when one of the parties has
lost his power of response the key is gone. If the lock won't yield to the
key, you are satisfied that the key is the wrong one, no matter how much it
looks like the right one. I think I could tell my dog from a thousand other
dogs; but if the creature were to lose his memory and to pass me in the
street without answering my call, I should pass on, simply observing that
he bore a remarkable likeness to my animal.

Most of us, I suppose, have experienced in a momentary and partial degree a
sudden stoppage of the apparatus of memory. You are asked, let us say, to
spell "parallelogram." In an ordinary way you could do it on your head or
in your sleep; but the sudden demand gives you a mental jerk that makes the
wretched word a hopeless chaos of r's and l's, and the more you try to sort
them out the less convincing do they seem. Or walking with a friend you
meet at a turn in the street that excellent woman, Mrs. Orpington-Smith.
You know her as well as you know your own mother, but the fact that you
have got to introduce her by her name forthwith sends her name flying into
space. The passionate attempt to capture it before it escapes only makes
its escape more certain, and you are reduced to the pitiful expedient of
mumbling something that is inaudible.

The worst experience of a lapse of memory that ever came to me was in the
midst of a speech which I had to make before a large gathering in a London
hall. I had got to the middle of what I had to say when it seemed to me
that the whole machine of the mind suddenly ceased to work. It was as
though an immense loneliness descended on me. I saw