It’s my opinion that every one I know has morals, though I wouldn’t like to ask.  I know I have.  But I’d rather teach them than practice them any day.  “Give them to others”—­that’s my motto.  Then you never have any use for them when you’re left without.  Now, speaking of the caprices of memory in general, and of mine in particular, it’s strange to think of all the tricks this little mental process plays on us.  Here we’re endowed with a faculty of mind that ought to be more supremely serviceable to us than them all.  And what happens?  This memory of ours stores up a perfect record of the most useless facts and anecdotes and experiences.  And all the things that we ought to know—­that we need to know—­that we’d profit by knowing—­it casts aside with the careless indifference of a girl refusing her true lover.  It’s terrible to think of this phenomenon.  I tremble in all my members when I consider all the really valuable things that I’ve forgotten in seventy years—­when I meditate upon the caprices of my memory.

There’s a bird out in California that is one perfect symbol of the human memory.  I’ve forgotten the bird’s name (just because it would be valuable for me to know it—­to recall it to your own minds, perhaps).

But this fool of a creature goes around collecting the most ridiculous things you can imagine and storing them up.  He never selects a thing that could ever prove of the slightest help to him; but he goes about gathering iron forks, and spoons, and tin cans, and broken mouse-traps —­all sorts of rubbish that is difficult for him to carry and yet be any use when he gets it.  Why, that bird will go by a gold watch to bring back one of those patent cake-pans.

Now, my mind is just like that, and my mind isn’t very different from yours—­and so our minds are just like that bird.  We pass by what would be of inestimable value to us, and pack our memories with the most trivial odds and ends that never by any chance; under any circumstances whatsoever, could be of the slightest use to any one.

Now, things that I have remembered are constantly popping into my head.  And I am repeatedly startled by the vividness with which they recur to me after the lapse of years and their utter uselessness in being remembered at all.

I was thinking over some on my way up here.  They were the illustrations I spoke about to the young lady on the way up.  And I’ve come to the conclusion, curious though it is, that I can use every one of these freaks of memory to teach you all a lesson.  I’m convinced that each one has its moral.  And I think it’s my duty to hand the moral on to you.

Now, I recall that when I was a boy I was a good boy—­I was a very good boy.  Why, I was the best boy in my school.  I was the best boy in that little Mississippi town where I lived.  The population was only about twenty million.  You may not believe it, but I was the best boy in that State—­and in the United States, for that matter.