A sudden idea presented itself.  What if the name was a very unusual name, one, in fact, that I had never heard, or seen written, except as the name of this Doctor?  This thought included other thoughts—­one was the idea of a written name.  I had been following but one line of approach, while there were two,—­sound and form.  I had not considered the written approach, but now I saw the importance of that process.  Another thought was, whether it would help me for the name to be not merely unusual, but entirely unknown.  I could not decide this question.  I saw reasons for and against.  If it was an utterly unknown name, except as applied to the Doctor, I might never recover it; I might continue to roll names and names through my brain for years without result, if my brain could bear such thought for so long.  I pictured in fancy an old man who had forgotten in time his own name, and had accepted another, wasting, and having wasted, the years of his life in hunting a word impossible and valueless.  But I fought this fear and put it to sleep.  The uncommon name would cause me to reject all common names, perhaps at first presentation; my attention would be concentrated on peculiar sounds and forms.  If my mind were now in condition to respond to the name, I might get it very soon.

In debating this point, I suppose that I lost sight of my objective, for I sank to sleep.

At daylight I was awake.  My mind held fast the results of the night’s work.  I wrote as follows:—­

C G K....  P

Before we marched I had arranged in groups the names that impressed me.  I had C without any following.

For G, I had Gayle, or Gail.

For K, Kame, Kames, Kean, Key, Kinney, Knight.

For P, only Payne.

We marched.  My head was full of my list of names.  I knew them without looking at what I had written.

All at once I dropped the C. I had failed to add to the bare initial—­nothing in my thought could follow that C.

Why had I held the C so long?  There must be some reason.  What was its peculiarity?  The question was to be solved before I would leave it.  It did not take long.  I decided that I had been attracted to it simply because its sound was identical with K. Then K loomed up large in my mind and took enormous precedence.

The name Payne was given up.

But another, or rather similar, question arose in regard to Payne.  If K was so prominent, why had Payne influenced me?  It took me an hour to find the reason, but I found it, for I had determined to find it.  It was simple, after all—­the attraction lay in the letters a-y-n-e.  At once I added to my K’s the name Kayne, although the name evoked no interest.  Thinking of this name, I saw that Kane was much easier and added it to my list, wondering why I had not thought of it before.

The process of exclusion continued.  Why Kinney?  And why Knight?  The peculiarity in Kinney seemed to be the two syllables; I did not drop the name, but tried to sound each of my others as two syllables.