Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/561

Rh large town in Yorkshire could not find a key which gave access to all the safes and desks in the bank. This key was a duplicate key, and ought to have been found in a place accessible only to himself and to the assistant-manager. The assistant-manager was absent on a holiday in Wales, and the manager's first impression was, that the key had probably been taken away by this assistant in mistake. He wrote to him, and learned to his own great surprise and distress that he had not got the key, and knew nothing of it. Of course, the idea that the key, which gave access to every valuable in the bank, was in the hands of any wrong person, having been taken with a felonious intention, was to him most distressing. He made search everywhere, thought of every place in which the key might possibly be, and could not find it. The assistant-manager was recalled, both he and every person in the bank were questioned, but no one could give any idea of where the key could be. Of course, although no robbery had taken place up this point, there was the apprehension that a robbery might be committed after the storm, so to speak, had blown over, when a better opportunity would be afforded by the absence of the same degree of watchfulness. A first-class detective was then brought down from London, and this man had every opportunity given him of making inquiries; every person in the bank was brought up before him; he applied all those means of investigation which a very able man of this class knows how to employ; and at last he came to the manager and said: "I am perfectly satisfied that no one in the bank knows any thing about this lost key. You may rest assured that you have put it somewhere yourself, and you have been worrying yourself so much about it that you have forgotten where you put it away. As long as you worry yourself in this manner, you will not remember it; but go to bed to-night with the assurance that it will be all right; get a good night's sleep; and in the morning I think it is very likely you will remember where you have put the key." This turned out exactly as it was predicted. The key was found the next morning in some extraordinarily secure place which the manager had not previously thought of, but in which he then felt sure he must have put it himself.

Now, then, ladies and gentlemen, this you may say is merely a remarkable case of that which we all of us are continually experiencing; and so I say it is. Who is there among you who has not had occasion some time or other to try to recall something to his (or her) mind which he has not been able to bring to it? He has seen some one in the street, for instance, whose face he recognizes, and says, "I ought to know that person;" and thinks who it can be, going over (it may be) his whole list of friends and acquaintances in his mind, without being able to recall who it is; and yet, some hours afterward, or it may be the next day, it flashes into his mind who this unknown person is. Or you may want to remember some particular and recent event; or it may be, as I have heard classical scholars say, to recall the source of a