And they said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks winter
and summer just the same, and his first wife's name was Jane Shook - she
was from New England - and his second one died in a lunatic asylum. It
was in the blood. She was from Lexington, Kentucky. Name was Horton
before she was married.'
And so on, by the hour, the man's tongue would go. He could NOT forget
any thing. It was simply impossible. The most trivial details remained
as distinct and luminous in his head, after they had lain there for
years, as the most memorable events. His was not simply a pilot's
memory; its grasp was universal. If he were talking about a trifling
letter he had received seven years before, he was pretty sure to deliver
you the entire screed from memory. And then without observing that he
was departing from the true line of his talk, he was more than likely to
hurl in a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that
letter; and you were lucky indeed if he did not take up that writer's
relatives, one by one, and give you their biographies, too.
Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrences are
of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting
circumstance from an uninteresting one.
