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.
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