Class 11 English 2024 Edition www.tntextbooks.in · Section 74

a long chain of circumstances leads to a number of embarrassing questions being asked, and I am compelled to produce the evidence of my guilt from my pocket. This, it might be thought, must be due to a lack of interest in other people’s letters; but that cannot be the explanation, for I forget to post some even of the few letters that I myself remember to write. As for leaving articles in trains and in taxies, I am no great delinquent in such matters. I can remember almost anything except books and walking-sticks and I can often remember even books. Walking- sticks I find it quite impossible to keep. I have an old-fashioned taste for them, and I buy them frequently but no-sooner do I pay a visit to a friend’s house or go a journey in a train, than another stick is on its way into the world of the lost. I dare not carry an umbrella for fear of losing it. To go through life without ever having lost an umbrella- has even the grimmest- jawed umbrella-carrier ever achieved this? Few of us, however, have lost much property on our travels through forgetfulness. The ordinary man arrives at his destination with all his bags and trunks safe. The list of articles lost in trains during the year suggests that it is the young rather than the adult who forget things, and that sportsmen have worse memories than their ordinary serious- minded fellows. A considerable number of footballs and cricket-bats, for instance, were forgotten. This is easy to understand, for boys, returning from the games, have their imaginations still filled with a vision of the playing-field, and their heads are among the stars - or their hearts in their boots - as they recall their exploits or their errors. They are abstracted from the world outside them. Memories prevent them from remembering to do such small prosaic things as take the ball or the bat with them when they leave the train. For the rest of the day, they are citizens of dreamland. The same may be