So the sailor
says in the play:
"Here are my arms, here is my manly bosom, but where's my Mary?"
iii
What tricks imagination plays! Thus, if we expect a person in the
street we transform a dozen impossible people into him while they are
still too far off to be seen distinctly; and when we expect to hear a
footstep on the stairs--as, we will say, the postman's--we hear
footsteps in every sound. Imagination will make us see a billiard
hall as likely to travel farther than it will travel, if we hope that
it will do so. It will make us think we feel a train begin to move
as soon as the guard has said "All right," though the train has not
yet begun to move if another train alongside begins to move exactly
at this juncture, there is no man who will not be deceived. And we
omit as much as we insert. We often do not notice that a man has
grown a beard.
iv
I read once of a man who was cured of a dangerous illness by eating
his doctor's prescription which he understood was the medicine
itself. So William Sefton Moorhouse [in New Zealand] imagined he was
being converted to Christianity by reading Burton's Anatomy of
Melancholy, which he had got by mistake for Butler's Analogy, on the
recommendation of a friend. But it puzzled him a good deal.
v
At Ivy Hatch, while we were getting our beer in the inner parlour,
there was a confused melee of voices in the bar, amid which I
distinguished a voice saying:
"Imagination will do any bloody thing almost.
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