Nothing with these people is confessed and above board, and nothing is shown openly so that you may look at it all round and judge for yourself what it is like and what it is worth. The utmost they do is to uncover just a corner of something they keep back in the bulk, tantalizing you with glimpses that bewilder and mislead; or they will dangle before you the end of a clue which they want you to take up and follow, making you believe that you will be guided thereby into the very heart of a mystery, and that you will find a treasure hidden in the centre of the maze which will abundantly repay you for the trouble of hunting it out. Nine times out of ten you will find nothing but a scarecrow of no more value than the rags of which it is composed--if even you find that. They are the people who repeat to you the most trivial things you may have said, and who remind you of the most unimportant things you may have done, years ago, all of which you have totally forgotten; but they will speak of them in a mysterious manner, as if they had been matters of vital meaning at the time--things which would open, if followed up, a page in your private history that it were better should be forgotten. As it is a question of memory, you cannot deny point-blank what they affirm; and as we all have pages of private history which we would rather not hear read aloud at the market-cross, you are obliged to accept their highly suggestive recollections with a queer feeling of helplessness and being somehow in their power--not knowing how much they are really acquainted with your secret affairs, nor whether the signal they have flashed before your eyes is a feint or a revelation. Of the same sort, with a difference, are those who are always going to tell you something some day--people burdened with a perennial mystery which never sees the light. You are for ever tormented with these folks' possibilities of knowledge. You turn over in your own mind every circumstance that you think they could have got hold of; you cunningly subject all your common friends to crafty cross-examination; you go, link by link, through the whole chain connecting you with them; but you can find nothing that leads to the mere outskirts of the mystery. You can make nothing of it; and your sphinx goes on to the end promising some day to tell you something which dies with him untold. Your only consolation is the inner conviction that there was nothing to tell after all.