And yet, the links forgotten, the man will say that he "just happened to think of" the debtor, or that "it somehow flashed right into my mind," etc. But it was nothing but the law of association--that's all. Moreover, you will now find that whenever you hear mentioned the term "association of mental ideas," etc., you will remember the above illustration or part of it. We have forged a new link in the chain of association for you, and years from now it will appear in your thoughts. CHAPTER XVIII. HOW TO REMEMBER WORDS, ETC. In a preceding chapter we gave a number of instances of persons who had highly developed their memory of words, sentences, etc. History is full of instances of this kind. The moderns fall far behind the ancients in this respect; probably because there does not exist the present necessity for the feats of memory which were once accepted as commonplace and not out of the ordinary. Among ancient people, when printing was unknown and manuscripts scarce and valuable, it was the common custom of the people to learn "by heart" the various sacred teachings of their respective religions. The sacred books of the Hindus were transmitted in this way, and it was a common thing among the Hebrews to be able to recite the books of Moses and the Prophets entirely from memory. Even to this day the faithful Mohammedans are taught to commit the entire Koran to memory. And investigation reveals, always, that there has been used the identical process of committing these sacred books to memory, and recalling them at will--the natural method, instead of an artificial one. And therefore we shall devote this chapter solely to this method whereby poems or prose may be committed to memory and recalled readily. This natural method of memorizing words, sentences, or verses is no royal road. It is a system which must be mastered by steady work and faithful review. One must start at the beginning and work his way up. But the result of such work will astonish anyone not familiar with it. It is the very same method that the Hindus, Hebrews, Mohammedans, Norsemen, and the rest of the races, memorized their thousands of verses and hundreds of chapters of the sacred books of their people. It is the method of the successful actor, and the popular elocutionist, not to mention those speakers who carefully commit to memory their "impromptu" addresses and "extemporaneous" speeches.