a cloud in consequence. One day, when something more serious than usual had resulted from this failing, he determined to overcome it, and from that moment resolved that his memory should do for him its appointed work, and forced it into action. He allowed himself to make no more memorandums or aids to memory, but demanded that the faculty should work for his assistance. The result is, he has but few equals in the country in this respect.

No one knows the strength of any of his powers, physical or mental, until it is tested. Winship, known the world over as the strong man, came to be so only by daily exercise in lifting weights, gradually increasing them as his muscular power developed; and other examples of increase in physical strength, not so striking, perhaps, but sufficiently so to attract notice, are common all about us.

The mental powers are subject to the same laws regulating growth as are the physical, and are as easily cultivated. Whose, then, the fault if he is forgetful? or with what reason can he urge as an excuse for neglect that phrase of self-condemnation, "I forgot."

XXXVII.-CONSCIENCE AND FUTURE JUDGMENT.

I SAT alone with my conscience,
In a place where time had ceased,
And we talked of my former living
In the land where the years increased.

And I felt I should have to answer
The question it put to me,

And to face the answer and question
Throughout all eternity.

The ghosts of forgotten actions

Came floating before my sight,

And things that I thought were dead things,
Were alive with a terrible might.

And the vision of all my past life
Was an awful thing to face,

Alone with my conscience, sitting
In that solemnly silent place.

And I thought of a far-away warning,
Of a sorrow that was to be mine,
In a land that then was the future,
But now is the present time.

And I thought of my former thinking
Of the judgment-day to be;
But, sitting alone with my conscience,
Seemed judgment enough for me.

And I wondered if there was a future
To this land beyond the grave;
But no one gave me an answer,
And no one came to save.

Then I felt that the future was present,
And the present would never go by,
For it was but the thought of my past life
Grown into eternity.

Then I woke from my timely dreaming,
And the vision passed away,

And I knew the far-away warning

Was a warning of yesterday.

And I pray that I may ne'er forget it,
In this land before the grave,
That I may not cry in the future,
And no one come to save.

And so I have learned a lesson,
Which I ought to have known before,

And which, though I learned it in dreaming,
I hope to forget no more.

K. N. E.-17.

So I sit alone with my conscience,
In the place where the years increase,
And I try to remember the future

In the land where time shall cease;

And I know of the future judgment,
How dreadful soe'er it be,

That to sit alone with my conscience
Will be judgment enough for me.

XXXVIII.-THE GHOST OF A SENSATION.

IT has long been known to surgeons that, when a limb has been cut off, the sufferer does not lose the consciousness of its existence. This has been found to be true in nearly every such case. Only about five per cent of the men who have suffered amputation never have any feeling of the part as being still present. Of the rest, there are a few who in time come to forget the missing member, while the remainder seem to retain a sense of its existence so vivid as to be more definite and intrusive than is that of its truly living fellow-member.

A person in this condition is haunted, as it were, by a constant or inconstant fractional phantom of so much of himself as has been lopped away-an unseen ghost of the lost part, and sometimes a presence made sorely inconvenient by the fact that while but faintly felt at times, it is at others acutely called to his attention by the pains or irritations which it appears to suffer from a blow on the stump or a change in the weather.

There is something almost tragical, something ghastly, in the notion of these thousands of spirit limbs haunting as many good soldiers, and every now and then tormenting them with the disappointments which arise when, the memory being off guard for a moment, the keen sense of

the limb's presence betrays the man into some effort, the failure of which of a sudden reminds him of his loss.

Many persons feel the lost limb as existing the moment they awaken from the merciful stupor of the ether given to destroy the torments of the knife; others come slowly to this consciousness in days or weeks, and when the wound has healed; but as a rule, the more sound and serviceable the stump, especially if an artificial limb be worn, the more likely is the man to feel faintly the presence of his shorn member. Sometimes a blow on the stump will reawaken such consciousness, or, as happened in one case, a reamputation higher up the limb will summon it anew into seeming existence.

In many, the limb may be recalled to the man by irritating the nerves in its stump. Every doctor knows that when any part of a nerve is excited by a pinch, a tap, or by electricity which is an altogether harmless means the pain, if it be a nerve of feeling, is felt as if it were really. caused in the part to which the nerve finally passes. A familiar illustration is met with when we hurt the " crazybone" behind the elbow. This crazy-bone is merely the ulnar nerve, which gives sensation to the third and fourth fingers, and in which latter parts we feel the numbing pain of a blow on the main nerve. If we were to divide this nerve below the elbow, the pain would still seem to be in the fingers, nor would it alter the case were the arm cut off. When, therefore, the current of a battery is turned upon the nerves of an arm stump, the irritation caused in the divided nerves is carried to the brain, and there referred at once to all the regions of the lost limb from which, when entire, these nerves brought those impressions of touch or pain which the brain converts into sensations. As the electric current disturbs the nerves, the limb is sometimes called back to sensory being with startling reality.

On one occasion the shoulder was thus electrized three inches above the point where the arm had been cut off.

For two years the man had ceased to be conscious of the limb. As the current passed, although ignorant of its possible effect, he started up, crying aloud, "Oh, the hand, the hand!" and tried to seize it with the living grasp of the sound fingers. No resurrection of the dead, no answer of a summoned spirit, could have been more startling. As the current was broken the lost part faded again, only to be recalled by the same means. This man had ceased to feel his limb. With others it is a presence never absent save in sleep. -S. Wier Mitchell, M. D.

XXXIX.-WHAT THE OLD MAN SAID.

WELL, yes, sir; yes, sir, thankee,

So, so, for my time of life;

I'm pretty gray, and bent with pains
That cut my nerves like a knife.
The winters bear hard upon me,

The summers scorch me sore;

I'm sort o' weary with all the world,
And I'm only turned three-score.

My old father is ninety,

And as hearty as a buck;

You won't find many men of his age
So full of vigor and pluck;

He felled the first tree cut in the place,
And laid the first log down;

And living an honest, temperate life,
He's the head man of the town.

But, you see, when I was twenty or so,
I wanted to go to the city,

And I got with a wild set over there,
That were neither wise nor witty;