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rubbish."
"
I must confess I do," said the hypnotist. "It carries one out of
oneself to hear of those quaint, adventurous, half-civilised days of the
nineteenth century, when men were stout and women simple. I like a good
swaggering story before all things. Curious times they were, with their
smutty railways and puffing old iron trains, their rum little houses and
their horse vehicles. I suppose you don't read books?"
"
Dear, no!" said Mwres, "I went to a modern school and we had none of
that old-fashioned nonsense. Phonographs are good enough for me."
"
Of course," said the hypnotist, "of course"; and surveyed the table for
his next choice. "You know," he said, helping himself to a dark blue
confection that promised well, "in those days our business was scarcely
thought of. I daresay if any one had told them that in two hundred
years' time a class of men would be entirely occupied in impressing
things upon the memory, effacing unpleasant ideas, controlling and
overcoming instinctive but undesirable impulses, and so forth, by means
of hypnotism, they would have refused to believe the thing possible. Few
people knew that an order made during a mesmeric trance, even an order
to forget or an order to desire, could be given so as to be obeyed after
the trance was over. Yet there were men alive then who could have told
them the thing was as absolutely certain to come about as--well, the
transit of Venus."
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