ning strength forbids, and moreover, now that I think of it,
another consideration would render any comparison of their characters
rather confusing than instructive to a reader. This is the fact that, in
common with the rest of the mind-readers, they had no names. Every one
had, indeed, an arbitrary sign for his designation in records, but it
has no sound value. A register of these names is kept, so they can at
any time be ascertained, but it is very common to meet persons who have
forgotten titles which are used solely for biographical and official
purposes. For social intercourse names are of course superfluous, for
these people accost one another merely by a mental act of attention,
and refer to third persons by transferring their mental pictures,--
something as dumb persons might by means of photographs. Something so,
I say, for in the pictures of one another's personalities which the
mind-readers conceive, the physical aspect, as might be expected with
people who directly contemplate each other's minds and hearts, is a
subordinate element.

I have already told how my first qualms of morbid self-consciousness at
knowing that my mind was an open book to all around me disappeared as I
learned that the very completeness of the disclosure of my thoughts and
motives was a guarantee that I would be judged with a fairness and a
sympathy such as even self-judgment cannot pretend to, affected as that
is by so many subtle reactions. The assurance of being so judged by
every one might well seem an inestimable privilege to one accustomed
to a world in which not even the tenderest love is any pledge of
comprehension, and yet I soon discovered that open-mindedness had a
still greater profit than this. How shall I describe the delightful
exhilaration of moral health and cleanness, the breezy oxygenated mental
condition, which resulted from the consciousness that I had absolutely
nothing concealed! Truly I may say that I enjoyed myself. I think surely
that no one needs to have had my marvelous experience to sympathize with
this portion of it. Are we not all ready to agree that this having a
curtained chamber where we may go to grovel, out of the sight of our
fellows, troubled only by a vague apprehension that God may look over
the top, is the most demoralizing incident in the human condition? It
is the existence within the soul of this secure refuge of lies which has
always been the despair of the saint and the exultation of the kna