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For years the land has grown nothing but weeds. Your soil needs organic matter which would make it more easy of cultivation, more retentive of moisture, and in every way better suited to the growth of plants. Liberal applications of stable manure would produce best effects. No commercial fertilizer would begin to be so desirable.

With a memory as retentive as a printed page, the keen-eyed old wanderer described the landscape league by league, the streams and their direction, the hills which were prominent, the broad stretches of savannah or grassy meadow, the belts of pine forest, the tongues of swamp which had to be avoided.

The best part of my face was my forehead, which was ample, and the worst my mouth, which was somewhat weak. I do not think, however, that any one would have guessed by looking at me as I then appeared at the age of seven and twenty, that I was an exceedingly hard-working man with extraordinary powers of observation and a really retentive memory.

In the case of any question of honour, or of moral honesty, we are sagacious in discerning and inexorable in judging the offence. No allowance is made for the suddenness of surprise, or the strength of temptations. One single failure is presumed to imply the absence of the moral or honourable principle. The memory is retentive on these occasions, and the man's character is blasted for life.

Other persons, on the other hand, possess little power to retain names, dates, quotations, and scattered facts; their desultory memory, as it is called, is very poor. But whatever native retentive power any particular brain happens to have, can never be altered.

The large majority of hunting women ride their own animals, or mounts lent them by friends; but some less fortunate ones have to content themselves with hirelings, many of which are unreliable conveyances, because they pass through so many hands, that they run a great risk of being spoiled by bad riders, and in that respect, horses have unfortunately very retentive memories.

"more effectually to answer the design of his commission... ate, drank, slept, danced, dressed, and painted himself with the Indians, so that it was not easy to distinguish him from the natives, he married also with them, and being endued with a strong understanding and retentive memory he soon learned their dialect, and by gradual advances impressed them with a very ill opinion of the English, representing them as fraudulent, avaritious and encroaching people; he at the same time inflated the artless savages with a prodigious high opinion of their own importance in the American scale of power.... Having thus infected them... he easily formed them into a nominal republican government crowned their old Archimagus emperor after a pleasing new savage form, and invented a variety of high-sounding titles for all the members of his imperial majesty's red court."

The extent of his general information, indeed, his great literary knowledge, but, above all, his retentive memory, stored with the legends and the poetry of ancient times, saved him from the necessity of drawing upon his own peculiar studies for the topics of his conversation.

I was not in the least conscious at this time that a large wareroom amply stored by virtue of a retentive memory was not the most needed as an equipment for all the practical affairs of life. I have ever found it necessary to dodge some memories, when there was lack of time to endure a hailstorm of details.

Bishop has never been what may be termed physically robust, he possesses great power of prolonged mental application. And being also endowed with a most remarkably retentive memory, his mind is stored with a very comprehensive knowledge of law. And if there be one faculty of his mind more than another, that gives character to the man, it is his prodigious memory of facts.