LOST!

King Country Chronicle, Volume VIII, Issue 640, 4 February 1914, Page 7

LOST!

THE REMARK\BI,H EXPERT;: OF A MAN WHOSE MEMORY FAILED. Will the memory of those a'.Vtul days ever leave me ? Luckily, they only come back to me in glimpses. Sometimes it is a memory of a bewildered brain torturing itself in a frenzy to re-discover its lost idvivUty. There are days, on the oilur hand, of which never a shrcad comes back to me—days on which I must have been merely a wandering clod of earth. How my memory actually went I remember clearly. I was strolling through a London park, the heat and glare of a scorching August sun keeping my pace a slow ons. Suddenly I felt a strange, eerie feeling in my left arm, as if a chill wind were blowing steadily down it. A dizzy faintness made me sink into a .seat. How long had elapsed when I recovered consciousness I do not I now. Passers-by were coming and going ; the tramp at the other end of the seat still slept noisily ; nobody had noticed anything. Somehow I found myself standing on the kerb. The constant jostling set me following the stream. A man smiled recognisingly as We approached. As he got nearer, the cordial smile changed into a puzeled stare. For a moment he hesitated, but went on. A glance back showed that he was looking over his shoulder. A passer-by bumped into me. "So sorry !'' he began ; and then, you're the very man I want ! How's that Simpson affair going ?" I answered evasively. As he chatted on, my foolish, .meaningless answers made him glance at me more and more curiously. "Nothing wrong, is there ?" he asked at last. "You don't look up to the mark." '"l—oh, I'm—no, I'm not feeling very bright !" I murmured. And when he was gone I hated myself for not telling him the truth. The next picture in my memory is one of a railway company's huge coloured poster—a purple moorland, over which white, tower'ing clouds gaily - sailed, touched some hidden chord. I see myself at the station — how I got there I do not knowtaking a ticket for that moorland town. And then the veil falls again. It was not, as I know now, till ten days after that I stood in the policestation at a small Yorkshire village —penniless, bearded, and worn to skin and bone. Some mysterious change of clothing had turned me, from battered cap to gaping boots, into a tramp. I began feebly to explain, and the next thing I remember is waking to consciousness in the county infirmary. I had fainted away on the stone floor. Soon I was convalescent enough to potter about the ward in a red flannel jacket, doing odd jobs for the nurses, and answering gladly to "Sonny." * Not a glimmer of memory was present yet, though by daily cross examination and subtle pumping the doctors did their best to coax the benumbed faculty to life again. It was subtlety at last that won. The resident physician cams out to the balcony one morning where I sat enjoying the w sunlight. As wc chatted he opened a newspaper he carried. •'I see Malagas are up to eightyfive," he remarked casually. "Queer." I answered abstractedly—my thoughts were elsewhere. "They closed, yesterday at 'eighty-two." "Know much about stocks?" he asked lazily. '.'Well, naturally, seeing I'm in and Sons' office,," I replied mechani•cally. Excitedly he shook my arm. I turned round with a. start. "Know what you've been saying ?" he demanded. '"No. What ?" He told me. I shook my head dully. "Never mind,' he reassured me ; "we'll "find you, my son." Two days later I was told there was a visitor for me. Tlie doctor took me down, and I trembled as I went. An old lady ran towards me, with streaming eyes. For a moment i stared unrecognisingly. Then something spun in my head like a wheel, and with a rush my memory was in its place again. It was my mother ! —'"Answfers."