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222, Baron Sebastian von Troomp" but to my great amazement and greater chagrin he simply turned his strange eyes, with the faraway look, upon me for an instant, and then resumed his contemplation of the beautifully tinted sheet of water, as if I hadn't opened my mouth. It was the most extraordinary treatment that I had experienced since my descent into the under world, and I was upon the point of resenting it, as became a true knight and especially a von Troomp, when Don Fum's brief description of the Rattlebrains, or Happy Forgetters, flitted through my mind.

Said he, "By the exercise of their strong wills they have been busy for ages striving to unload their brains of the to them now useless stock of knowledge accumulated by their ancestors, and the natural consequence has been that the brains of these curious folk, who call themselves the Happy Forgetters, relieved of all labor and strain of thought, have absolutely shrunken rather than increased in size, so that with many of the Happy Forgetters their brains are like the shrivelled kernel of a last year's nut and give forth a sharp click when they move their heads suddenly with a jerk, as is often their wont, for they take great pride in proving to the listener that they deserve the name of Rattlebrain.

"Nor do I need remind thee, O reader," concluded Don Fum, in his celebrated work on the "World within a World," "that the chiefest among the Happy Forgetters is the man whose head gives forth the loudest and sharpest click; for he it is who has forgotten most."

You can have but a faint idea, dear friends, of my delight at the prospect of spending some time among these curious people—people who look with absolute dread upon knowledge as the one thing necessary to get rid of before happiness can enter the human heart.

No joy can equal the Happy Forgetter's when, upon clasping a friend's hand, he finds that he has forgotten his very name; and no day is well spent in this land at the close of which the inhabitant may not exclaim,—