As slowly as I could, to gain time, I reached for my card-case
and fumbled for a card, hoping to remember. But no ray came. Until
I actually read my name on my card it was as utterly gone as if
I had never heard it. If the people of Boston got anything out of
my speech that day they did better than I. All the time I spoke
something kept saying over within me: "You are a nice fellow to
make a speech at the Institute of Technology; you don't even know
your own name."
After that I was haunted by a feeling that I would lose myself
altogether, and got into the habit of leaving private directions in
the office where I would probably be found, should question arise.
It arose at last in a Brooklyn church where I was making a speech
with my magic-lantern pictures. While I spoke a feeling kept
growing upon me that I ought to be down in the audience looking at
the pictures. It all seemed a long way off and in no way related to
me. Before I knew it, or any one had time to notice, I had gone
down and taken a front seat. I sat there for as much as five minutes
perhaps, while the man with the lantern fidgeted and the audience
wondered, I suppose, what was coming next.
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