you think of poor President Garfield’s sickness, during which they tried to cool his room with ice.  Each of these thoughts (ideas) has evidently called up another connected—­associated—­with it in some way.  This is the association of ideas:  it is a law that governs almost all our thinking, as any one may discover by going back over his own thoughts.  Perhaps an easier way to discover it will be to observe the rapid talk of an afternoon caller on the family, and see how the conversation skips from one subject to another which the last suggested, and from that to another suggested by this, and so on.

Just this association of ideas it is which enables us to recall things we have forgotten.  Our ideas on any subject—­say that sleigh-ride last winter—­resemble a lot of balls some distance apart in a room, but all connected by strings.  If there is any particular ball we cannot find,—­that is, some fact we cannot remember,—­then if we pull the neighboring balls it is likely that they by the connecting strings will bring the missing ball into sight.  To illustrate this, suppose that you cannot remember the route of that sleigh-ride.  You recall carefully all the circumstances associated with the ride, in hopes that some one of them will suggest the route that was taken.  You think of your companions, of the moon being full, of having borrowed extra robes, of the hot bricks—­Ah, there is a clue!  The bricks were reheated somewhere.  Where was it?  They were placed on a stove,—­on a red-hot stove with a loafers’ foot-rail about it.  That settles it.  Such stoves are found only in country grocery-stores; and now it all comes back to you.  The ride was by the hill road to Smith’s Corners.  It is as if there were a string from the hot-bricks idea to the idea that the bricks were reheated, to this necessarily being done on a stove, to the peculiar kind of stove it was done on, to the only place in the neighborhood where such a stove could be, to Smith’s Corners; and this string has led you, like a clue, to the fact you desired to remember.

We can now return to the question asked above:  In trying to recall names, why is it so difficult to find a clue?  After what has been said, the question can be put in a better form:  Why does not the association of ideas enable us to recall names as it does other things?  The answer is, that names (proper names) have very few associations, very few strings, or clues, leading to them.  It is easy to see this; for suppose you moved away from the neighborhood of that sleigh-ride many years before, and in thinking over past times find yourself unable to recall the name of the Corners where the store stood.  The place can be remembered perfectly, and a thousand circumstances connected with it, but they furnish no clue to the name:  the circumstances might all remain the same and the name be any other as well.  The only 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.