It may be asked, how, then, is it that we do remember some names, as those in use every day?  Just as the multiplication-table is remembered,—­by force of familiarity.  Constant repetition engraves them in the mind.  When in old age the vigor of the mind lessens, the engraving wears out and names are hard to recall, since there is no other clue to them than this engraved record.

There may be mentioned one slight help in recalling names when the case is important or desperate.  It consists in going back to the period when the name was known and deliberately writing out a circumstantial account of all the connected incidents, mentioning names of persons and places whenever they can be remembered.  If this is done in a casual way, without thinking of the purpose in view,—­as if one were sending a gossipy letter of personal history to a friend,—­the mind falls into an automatic condition that may result in producing the desired name itself.  Every one must have observed that it is this automatic activity of the mind, and not conscious effort, which recovers lost names most successfully.  We “think of them afterwards.”

XENOS CLARK.

A Reminiscence of Harriet Martineau.

It is more than fifty years since I, a mere child, spent a summer with my parents in a sandy young city of Indiana.  Eight or nine hundred souls, perhaps more, were already anchored within its borders.  Chicago, a lusty infant just over the line, her feet blackened with prairie mud, made faces, called names, and ridiculed its soil and architecture.  Nevertheless it was a valiant little city, even though its streets were rivers of shifting sand, through which “prairie-schooners” were toilsomely dragged by heavy oxen or a string of chubby ponies,—­these last a gift from the coppery Indian to the country he was fast forsaking.  Clouds of clear grit drifted into open casements on every passing breeze, or, if a gale arose, were driven through every crevice.  Our little city was cradled amid the shifting sand-hills on Michigan’s wave-beaten shore.  Indeed, it had received the name of the grand old lake in loving baptism, and was pluckily determined to wear it worthily.  Its buildings were wholly of wood, and hastily constructed, some not entirely unpretentious, while others tilted on legs, as if in readiness at shortest notice to take to their heels and skip away.  In those early days there was only the round yellow-bodied coach swinging on leathern straps, or the heavy lumber-wagon, to accommodate the tide of travel already setting westward.  It was a daily delight to listen to the inspiring toot of the driver’s horn and the crack of his long whip, as, with six steaming horses, he swung his dusty passengers in a final grand flourish up to the hospitable door of the inn.