My Experiences in a Lunatic Asylum Part 2

I was caught in the act of laughing at a play of my own only the other day, and I hear that a head-shaker spoke of it at the Mutton-chops Club afterwards as a melancholy sign of my mental condition. They congregate much at some latter-day clubs, the members of this sect; and, in the absence of natural material in that way, they tell each other what to think, and then go home and think it. Applied to literary work, the result sometimes comes forth as 'criticism.'

Let no man, then, be imprisoned for insanity till his state has been fully and carefully observed for a certain time; nor then, unless the certificate has been signed by two, or _more_, well-qualified and practised men, one of whom at least should have known the patient well and long. Let private asylums, where it is in the interest of the proprietors to keep the patients as long as they can, be swept away. I have known the enrolment of new patients on their books--may the poor people be helped, and those who place them there forgiven!--cited with as much pride as that of new boys at a schoolmaster's. Let public asylums be subst.i.tuted, where it is in all interests to have as few patients as possible, instead of as many, and to dismiss them as soon as may be. Let the harmless, of whom there is a large proportion, be kept out of asylums altogether. Who knows what cruel pain the a.s.sociations of their life may hourly give them? Let publicity take the place of hus.h.i.+ng up--which never did any good in the world whatever--to the fullest extent. Let the warders (whom I have postponed for the present in deference to their social betters) be carefully selected for character and kindness, and be what they should be--nurses of the sick. Let the Commissioners, if they are to go on existing, read their duty in a different way. Further, let severe criminal penalties attach to every abuse of the reformed Lunacy Law, and let every facility be given to the sufferer as against doctors, relations, Commissioners, anybody, be he great as he may. At present the law, with all its intricate machinery for good or ill, fights dead against us: with my correspondent's plea for the sensibilities of those engaged in this line of practice, I am not much concerned. They need not adopt it if they do not like, I suppose. They follow their profession for profit like the rest of us, and have no need to pose as philanthropists, or ask for sympathy. 'Il faut vivre' would be their best explanation of their work; and I know of no case in which the great Frenchman's answer would come with more crus.h.i.+ng force, 'Monsieur, je n'en vois pas la necessite.'

If these suggestions of mine, which I did not propose to offer, savour rather of the destructive, to use my correspondent's phrase, it is because destruction is the only reform possible; and to patch up the old system is like mending worn-out garments with older cloth. When reform, utter and complete, has been devised and carried out, insanity may be 'eliminated'--I quote the same writer again--more than he thinks; for a blessing may fall on men's efforts which seems very justly denied to them now. As long as this form of false imprisonment is possible, as long as scores of sane men and women are being maddened in private asylums, and hundreds of mad people being driven madder, insanity in England will not decrease. As for its proper medical treatment, I have nothing to do with it and nothing to say to it. I take up my correspondent's address at his desire, in the hope of learning something, and this sentence is among the first to catch my eye: 'Voisin says that in simple insanity he finds certain alterations in the gray matter of the cerebrum, consisting of minute apoplexies, effusions of haematin and haematosin into the lymphatic sheaths, infarctions, atheroma, capillary dilatations, and necrosis of vessels, and certain changes of cerebral cells.' Quite so. It may be all very true; but I can offer no suggestions as to medical treatment based upon these remarkable a.s.sumptions. When, shortly before my final removal, I was allowed to see a relation of mine at a town at some distance off, the princ.i.p.al objected to the permission being too often given, because conversation carried off too much white matter from the brain. I distinctly a.s.sert that he said 'white,' because, by connotation of the statement with Voisin's valuable remarks, it will appear that the 'gray'

remained in my case unaffected. That neither haematin nor haematosin has been effused into my sheaths, that my capillaries remain undilated, and that I am proudly conscious of having escaped both atheroma and infarctions, I must ask my readers to accept my word. What abominable nonsense is all this! And how soon may such nonsense degenerate into evil.

In another part of the same pamphlet I find the writer presently citing this Voisin's recommendation of the 'strait waistcoat' on the ground that the patients like it! There, I think, it is as well to lay the treatise down.

To take up again the thread of my personal story, I have described how I was called 'homicidal.' Where my 'voices' came from, to which I alluded in my first chapter, I never understood; for indeed I have not the faintest notion what they mean. They are used as a yoke-horse with 'delusions;' and being simply nonsensical, they admit of no possible answer. As far as I can remember, after old Diafoirus had asked me a variety of questions to find out the especial form of madness for which my friends had committed me to his tender mercies, and became naturally more puzzled as he went on, he suggested 'voices' as a last desperate resource; and I, being rather tired of the business, and having thus far been unable to admit a single 'symptom' propounded, jumped at the solution as being purely idiotic. I presume that I must have admitted that at times, when I am alone and doing nothing, I am able to fancy to myself the speech and address of absent friends. Heaven knows I needed the fancy there. It struck me as a harmless admission; and when I was once afterwards gravely informed that 'voices' are about the most dangerous and incurable sign of mental alienation, even in my extremity I could not help being tickled by the profound absurdity of the whole thing. 'Voices,' said my friend of the Inverness to me one day in a moment of confidence,--he too was able to discourse pleasantly enough of old college-times, poetry, and other matters when he chose,--'they are always bothering me about "voices," and I don't know what the devil they mean.' This man has been a hopeless prisoner for some time; but he was so far wiser than I that he only admitted to hearing voices indoors; I rashly allowed that I heard them quite as often out of doors as in. I hear them often when I am hungry, summoning me with much emphasis to my meals.

This idea of 'voices' was in my case a suggestion of the doctor's, thrown out innocently enough, perhaps, in the first instance; but it did me in my illness fearful harm. It may be felt by all who know how much, at the best of times, some old tune or sc.r.a.p of odd verse will haunt and worry us, with what tenacity this fancy, once implanted, would take root and bud in a brain always active and imaginative, and then wearied and overworn by long weakness, and incapable of the brave effort by which alone such contemptible nonsense could be shaken off, amid its grotesque and terrible surroundings. Harried and bothered about fits, voices, delusions, white matters and gray; ill beyond belief, and longing for nothing but good food and rest, but 'watched' night and day; speculating what and who all these people might be; irritated by the doctors and insulted by the attendants--vigorously kicked by one of them one morning, I remember, when my hands were too weak to do their office, and I did not dress myself quick enough to please him--that I should be here now, sound and strong, I may well attribute to some Power above the selfishness of men, which will not suffer these infamies to go too far. After the usual fas.h.i.+on in such cases, the doctor of that place may now claim credit for my 'cure.' I will show, before I have done, how he cut himself off, by his own deliberate statement, from the possibility of claiming it. Over these 'voices' of his I brooded and brooded till they a.s.sumed some thing very like reality. I thought in my wretchedness of some dead and gone who would have s.h.i.+elded me from this with their lives, till their unforgotten 'voices' became at last a very part and parcel of my individual being, if a certified madman may presume to claim it. They comforted and yet they haunted me, till at last I can almost believe that they became to me guardian angels, like the 'voices' of Joan of Arc. Small chance would she have stood in the hands of British specialists. England might have punished her worse than by f.a.gots if she had handed her over to them. For me, had I to choose again between the most painful death and another term of imprisonment in the asylum best beloved of the Commissioners, I should scarcely hesitate a moment in my selection of the first. These 'voices' of the doctor's creation were to be cast in my teeth again and again. One of the three questions vouchsafed me by a Commissioner, during the whole period, related to them; and when I say again what I said in my first chapter, that they are the worst piece of humbug of all, I believe that I speak the truth, which is difficult where all is humbug. I have his leave to quote here the words of a friend's letter written about this history of mine. He spent one night at this same asylum, upon a visit there to a 'patient': 'Well may you say there is but one thing that can enable a man to bear such a trial. I often wonder how I got through that night, and how it was I did not find myself between two keepers next morning. I am sure I heard voices enough, but they were holy ones.'

This friend, who was not allowed to see me, was on a visit to a brother of his, whom I have described as having interested himself in my release. He had first been spirited away to another asylum (from which he was afterwards transferred), when his brother was but a few yards distant, knowing nothing of what was being done. He knew his brother to be sane, maintained it throughout, and at last succeeded in releasing him. A few facts in the story are a good pendant to mine. The victim in this instance had been engaged in all the worries of an election, when some friend took him to consult an eminent mad-doctor, who owned a private asylum in London. The doctor said that he thought him out of his mind. My friend went and demanded his reasons. The answer was that throughout a long conversation he had shown himself perfectly reasonable and consecutive, but on going away he had taken up the doctor's hat instead of his own.

Forcible as this argument was, it was not enough, even in the opinion of relatives, to shut the man up for. But on a later occasion he became excited about something, and the same authority was again privately consulted. No information was given to my friend; but early in the morning this doctor sent two keepers from his own asylum, ready to wait for the result of an interview between the patient and two doctors, suddenly sprung upon him (one an utter stranger), under whose certificates he was then and there removed. When my friend heard of it, he took steps at once, but found that he could do nothing. The law provides that the two certifying doctors shall not be partners. One of these was in the habit of taking the business of the other in his absence. 'This _was_ his partner,' said my friend, when looking about for redress. 'Not a _registered_ partner, I am afraid,' was the legal answer. The Common Law Procedure Act, I fear, has failed to abolish special pleading, or to efface from the lesser legal mind the delusion--may I use the word?--that the object of Law is to defeat justice.[1] For some time the prisoner remained in this asylum; and he so far justifies the Commissioners in their preference, that he describes that where I was confined, to which he was transferred, as good in comparison. In that other place he had no room of his own, and was herded, always, with all the mad indiscriminately. The only exercise they were allowed was within the walls of the grounds, the asylum being in London. He was denied pen and ink; but he saw the warders do such things that he contrived to pencil down some notes of what he saw, and succeeded at last in obtaining the materials, and writing to the Commissioners of what he had seen. 'We' were allowed to write to the Commissioners, if we found out our right. How many such letters we contrive to write, how many are sent if written, how many read if sent, how many acted upon if read, I do not know. In this instance these ordeals were all pa.s.sed; for the Commissioners came, made an enquiry, and did--nothing. But the objectionable patient was removed to another place, where I met him during my second term. Sane patients must be in some respects a trial. I understand that my old doctor frankly complains that I was the greatest bore whom he ever had in his care, and I believe it; though at the close of our relations he did not seem too anxious to get rid of me. We saw very little of each other then, my fellow-prisoner and I, for it might have been awkward, but enough to recognise each other's sanity. His brother was working hard for him, and at last two impartial doctors were sent down from town to enquire into his case. 'We' have a right to demand that also, I have understood since; though how but by a miracle we can use that right, I do not know. When it is gained, of what service is it likely to be in such a place, prejudiced as the new doctors must naturally be,--over-anxious as the victim must be, who dares not be excited, and therefore natural,--painful as the cross-examination is?

Nevertheless, in this case the two doctors, one of them famous in 'nervous' cases, certified this man to be sane, and left the certificate on record. It was kept back one month. I state the facts of this story upon my friend's authority, and by his permission.

[1] This episode is slightly corrected from the account as published in the newspaper in which it first appeared. I had understood that the partners.h.i.+p was between the asylum-proprietor and one of the doctors, in which I was wrong. The correction reads to me like Mids.h.i.+pman Easy's famous apology.

My friend worked hard without, as his brother did within; and the hard-earned freedom was won at last, it matters not to tell how. When I was myself freed, I travelled for some time with my old fellow-prisoner, and never saw in him one sign or trace of insanity. An eminent medical baronet, with a curiously suggestive name, who is rather a patron of the establishment, and occasionally 'diagnoses' a lunatic at an odd hour, had, a little time before, solemnly p.r.o.nounced from the tremor of his tongue--a member which, from my own experience, is apt to tremesce when one is nervous--that he was bound to have something dreadful--it matters not what--within a month. However, it is now very many months, and he has not had it. Slang is expressive sometimes. 'Bos.h.!.+' The baronet is said to be infallible at 'diagnosing' from the tongue this especial malady, which failed to appear. My friend had no illness. But those people had shaken his nerves, as for a long s.p.a.ce they shook mine. The wickedness was done.

How many are there who, in the face of such truths as these, can dare to disbelieve in Him who says still as He said of old, 'Shall not my soul be avenged on such a generation as this?' It is all very well to go to church and 'say' prayers, to quarrel about the form of your faith, the colour of your clothes, the number of your bows. Religion is an active, not a pa.s.sive, word; and, like revolutions, is not made with rose-water. Do something, somebody!

Let me close this chapter with my first escape, as my readers may be well tiring of my story. After some months of stupid unconsciousness, I was sent for change to the seaside _annexe_ of which I spoke. What the matron said, after the short time of quiet observation which was all I needed, has been told. What I felt when I learned from her where I was, I need not say. Very good for me was the a.s.sociation with her, who would rescue me from my companions and my warders, to take me out with her for a drive or a walk, in spite of the 'homicidal' tendencies of which she had been warned. By her a relation was summoned to see me apart from the a.s.sociations of the asylum, who had never seen me at all since the wrong was done; and seeing, had no choice but to remove me, though every obstacle was thrown in the way, by the Commissioners even, who, s.h.i.+rking their own responsibility, accepted for a salary, are glad enough to throw it upon anybody. Very good for me also was the a.s.sociation with the young doctor, a son of the princ.i.p.al, and his wife, who lived in the next house in charge of the 'branch.' They had me in to sup or play whist with them in the evenings, and said as the matron said. The young doctor took it upon himself, in spite of orders, to let me sleep in my room unwatched and alone, for the first time for many months; and the relief was beyond words. 'I wish,' he said, in answer to one of my questions, 'that you would simply stuff all the food and drink you can get.' When I was again, after some months of liberty, remitted to the asylum, I heard that he had given up all connection with it, with the regret with which one misses a personal friend. But I think that I was glad to hear it, even then. He had a comfortable berth enough had he cared to keep it; but he preferred to buy himself a general practice and to go. I do not wonder. Shakespeare was not as right as usual, when he said that 'conscience doth make cowards of us all;' for there are some of whom it makes brave men. It is the worst of enemies; but it is the best of friends and the most easily conciliated, if we try in the right way. But I will moralise no more.

VI.

The Head-shakers have a formal vocabulary of their own, which, after a certain experience, one begins to know by heart. It is constructed on the simple principle of giving a bad name to everything. This story has been called 'sensational,' when it is simply true. When a direct description of things as they are is sensational, things as they are are not things as they should be. I am told, too, that the story shows much disregard for people's feelings. It certainly does for mine, which are sensitive enough, and have been outraged beyond belief. When men condescend to think a little less of their own feelings, and a little more of theirs whom they shut up alive, we shall be on the road to amendment. Meanwhile, if anything I have written has at all hurt the natural sensitiveness of any who has suffered as I have, I am very sorry for it. To other feelings in the matter I am less than indifferent. 'Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung.'

These chapters are not intended to be read as what my friend of the pamphlet calls them--an onslaught on the medical men engaged in lunacy practice. They are an onslaught on a crying national sin, and all who favour it. Among the men in lunacy practice are men who abhor the system on which any man may be writ down mad. Among them I have myself found one of the best friends I have had. He was one of old standing. He saw me when I was nearly at my worst; but he did not shut me up. He took me to his own house, and poured in oil and wine, like the good Samaritan he is. After a few days' entertainment with his own family, and at his own table--and he would never have of me one penny for his infinite pains--he a.s.sured me, and my friends too, that I was only a hypochondriac bound to get well. He would have made me so, if I would have consented to stay with him, in spite of a certain faith in hydrate of chloral, which I wish he would abandon. 'h.e.l.l in crystals,' my defining friend has called it. (Perhaps I may add here that the relation who should know me best testified to my sanity with as little variation.) I well remember how this warm-hearted doctor carried me off under his own protest to see an eminent dietist whom I would consult, so completely had the occult qualities of eggs and cold mutton been worried into me, and almost shouted as he left the room, in answer to the stereotyped, 'I hope you are very particular about his diet,' 'Diet be strong-worded; why, the man is dying of inanition!' So I was. But I was restlessly bent on my own ruin, it would seem; and 'Tu l'as voulu, Georges Dandin!' was the burden of my earliest asylum-dreams. The rolling stone would only stop in the breakers at the bottom of the cliff; and I found no Sisyphus to roll it up again till I played both stone and Sisyphus myself. Why, however, I was thus hastily shut up without any reference to so skilled a friend, and without my seeing him, I do not know. It was of him that I was thinking when I suggested what I believe to be one of the most important and easiest of necessary reforms--that no man should be 'certificated' without the a.s.sent of at least one valuable authority who knows him well, after careful personal examination.

I have gone back again in my story, and a breath of sea-air will do it good. Imagine me with the matron again. The change from the asylum and its a.s.sociations to the little house by the seaside was very good in its effects. It was so for others than me; for the madmen there, poor fellows, seemed to me gentler and better in every way than they were when I saw them in the larger place. The warders were there to watch them, but had to be quiet and suppressed in a private house, and simply lived down-stairs as servants live. The breakfasts and dinners at the neat table, pleasantly presided over by a womanly hostess, were a relief indeed after my previous experience. That they should have proved so, when only she and I held consecutive conversation, and the other guests either kept silence or distracted us by strange words and antics enough to unnerve anybody, shows partially, I think, what the life which they 'relieved'

must have been. The poor singer of the 'Hey-diddle-diddle' beer-song was in the house, and his way of carving his bread with his knife and fork 'intrigued' me much till the matron told me where I was. There, too, was the good parsley-eater, who died of Bright's disease; and it was there, just after I left the house, that he died. Only two or three days before he had to sit down to dine with us; and I remember the kindness with which the matron made him lie down upon the sofa, seeing the suffering of which he knew not how to speak, and sent him to his bed. A short time before he had calmly looked me in the face across the table, and pledged me in the vinegar-cruet, which he emptied. His brother, a clergyman, dined with us on a visit, and looked at me, I thought, with some curiosity. What was I doing _dans cette galere_ struck more than one. Seen among the a.s.sociations and scenes of the asylum, I believe that any one might perhaps have thought me unfit to be removed, so completely ignorant was I, in common phrase, whether I was on my head or my heels. Twice a day, in the regular course of things, were the seven or eight lunatics who composed the seaside colony marched out for a const.i.tutional walk, with a pack of warders at their heels, in the direction opposite to the town and streets. Those walks were trying enough; at the asylum, among the country roads and lanes, they had been fearful. The matron saved me from them as much as possible, as I have said, with the most thoughtful and considerate kindness. She took me with her to hear the band upon the pier, and to stroll about with her, a prisoner on parole, among the holiday-makers of the popular watering-place; and those diversions, which seem dull enough in ordinary life, appeared to me quite exceptionally delightful. It was better when we talked of books and things and people; and what she said and wrote of me I have already told. In the evening she would rescue me from the rest to let me sup quietly with herself, when I did not go next door to supper or whist with the young doctor and his pleasant wife, who were in command of a detachment of female patients there. They, too, gave their opinion; and in the face of many remonstrances from quarters where I might least have expected them--in the face of the princ.i.p.al's opinion that I was a very dangerous person; in the face of her Majesty's admirable Commissioners, not one of whom I had to my knowledge so far seen, but who were well armed with the 'notes' of the warders--I was taken for the time away, and made a free man again. O spirit of Mr. Justice Stareleigh!

'Nathaniel, sir? How could I have got Daniel on my notes, unless you told me so, sir?' If the soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors, of the establishment had it down in their notes that I was mad, having been told so, to begin with, by their employers (who dilate on the delicacy of brain cases, yet trust the reports of ignorant men), how the deuce could I be anything else? Yet there was more than one of them, for all that, who did not believe it, and had the courage to say so. I will give no clue to their ident.i.ties; for they might be dismissed retrospectively, if they are still in harness, for such a breach of duty. It would be the best thing that could happen to them, perhaps. The hardest part of the whole snare to me was, that I, who would not hurt a dog if I could help it, was represented as 'violent' when I was weaker than any dog. It was enough to deter any but the bravest and kindliest from trying to help me; and I have no choice but to suppose that that was the object.

But the 'violence,' and the rest of it, was too palpable a lie. The deliverance came. Over the months which followed before I came to be imprisoned again, matron and young doctor gone--good plants flourish ill in such a soil as that--I wish to pa.s.s as lightly as possible. They would have chiefly to do with home matters which have no place in such a story as this, and only concern consciences to which I would have nothing to say. I have done with them--let them alone. The period of my freedom lasted ten months. I spent the time in aimless wandering from place to place--among the bathers of Trouville and the playgoers of Paris, in the hotels and streets of London--in a fas.h.i.+on which would make a story by itself, were this the place to set it down. The shock with which I had learned what had been done to me had shaken to the centre what nerve the 'treatment' had left me. Night after night I did nothing but dream, dream, dream of the asylum and its terrors. The warders, whose faces I knew so well, were always behind me; the antics of the madmen were re-acted with merciless fidelity. The sense of utter helplessness in the hands of mad-doctors, which the experience had left upon my mind, would leave me neither night nor day. A traveller's chance allusion in my hearing to 'Bedlam let loose,' or a whimsical song about 'Charenton' in a French vaudeville, would drive me out of the station or the theatre in helpless fear of I knew not what. If a gendarme accosted me at night in the streets, I shook all over in the expectation of being removed to a French asylum. If I saw an advertis.e.m.e.nt relating to an asylum in a casual newspaper, it was to lay it down in terror. There seemed to me but one power in the world--the power of the lunacy 'law.' Such is the confidence which our vaunted system, which professes to know no wrong without a remedy, could inspire in one who needed its protection so sorely as I. In one respect its might was certainly vindicated, for, abroad and at home, I thought that it could reach me anywhere. I kept these fears of mine as much as I could to myself; for to talk of them might be, under the circ.u.mstances of my life, to be shut up at once again. But it was a fearful trial. I was utterly cowed and frightened, and I was afraid to face anyone; for I thought I read in every face a knowledge of my story.

Except by an occasional desperate effort, I could force myself to meet no one. But ill as I was then, and full of fancies, not one of the old friends who saw me imagined in me a trace of insanity. That I know. In Paris especially I found one old literary friend, to whose rooms--from that odd thing called sympathy, I suppose--I was able to go more often than anywhere else, though seldom enough, Heaven knows! I have often wondered since what are his real thoughts in the matter. In theatres and hotels, in streets and in cafes, seldom allowing myself to sleep more than one or two consecutive nights in the same place, from the fear of being 'taken,' and, when I did stay, afraid of going to my room and then of leaving it--I dreed this dreary weird chiefly alone. And by the odd irony of the whole thing, this was the time when I was indeed nearest to madness, and really required careful watching; not that of warders or of repression, be it understood, but of the affection which is unhappily not made to order. I had been called suicidal and homicidal when I was no danger to anybody. Now thoughts of suicide did indeed take shape and form in my mind. In that there was no madness, for the impulse which madness supplies to carry these wretched thoughts into effect failed me always, and so saved my life. Yet there was not a day at last when I did not leave the house with the intention--if I could only find the needed courage--of bringing this impossible existence to an end. I knew that I was not going to die; but I believed that, after the line of treatment so shamefully adopted once, to save trouble, there was little chance of escaping a second condemnation if I did not die. And the event proved me miserably right. Have I not cause to say that I have no special call to spare the susceptibilities of others? I have no respect left for Pickwickian feelings--none.

London was but a repet.i.tion of the story of Paris. I struggled to the theatre once or twice. One night I hid myself at the back of the pit to listen to a play of my own which had just been brought out with some success--written, of course, some time before. I thought publicity dangerous, and wondered stupidly if I had ever written such things myself.

After some months in the country, where I tried to make a home-life in vain, and wore myself out more and more in long solitary walks, haunted by every kind of nervous fear, I went back again to London in despair, wondering if, as I had no courage to die, this would not in some way end itself by sheer force of exhaustion. It would not, for I was very full of life still. I let n.o.body know where I was, for I had no strength or care to write, and no one with whom I cared to communicate. Besides, I was afraid; and wandered from one hotel to another with a sort of hope of having become n.o.body. I had forfeited my individuality in the asylum; why want it back again? But I had to be accounted for, and one day at the Crystal Palace I found myself watched again by a 'gloomy man'--not with a yataghan, but a newspaper. Of course I thought he was a keeper, as I had been expecting that for some time; but he was only a detective. He was not very unlike some whom I have seen in plays, for he allowed me to detect his mission in a moment; and it gave me a certain grim amus.e.m.e.nt to lead him all over the gardens on a very unpleasant day, taking the most obvious notes of me that I ever saw, in an obtrusive red pocket-book. I strolled to the verge of the salt flood at the bottom of the gardens (not deep), where the antediluvians dwell, lingered about, and looked as if I meant to jump in. He showed no intention of interfering, but watched with interest from the opposite sh.o.r.e, and nearly filled his pocket-book. Then I disappointed him, turned away from the precipice like Box the printer, went to the refreshment-room and ate an ice. This bothered him a good deal, but he noted it down. In the train he got into a carriage conspicuously remote from mine; met a mate in London to whom he communicated his ideas; and, after watching me partake of a melancholy dinner in Lucas's comfortable coffee-room, while he dallied with buns and beer in the front shop, the two followed me to Mr. Hare's pleasant little theatre--I had never dared, after the lowering effect of the a.s.sociations of the 'establishment,' which seemed to sink me in my own esteem, to raise my eyes above the pit--sat behind me, and watched my conduct in respect of Gilbert's 'Broken Hearts' with a regretful desire evident in their own minds for 'something spicy;' then saw me safe to my hotel for the nonce, and departed with a conscientious feeling of having done their duty detectively, and having entirely escaped my observation. Were they primary scholars in the work, I wonder? And which kept the more accurate notes, the watcher in his book or the watched in his head? Nothing surprises me more, as I think over all that dreary time, than the singular acuteness of observation in me, which no date or detail seems to have escaped.

'Hyperaesthesia,' I suppose, or derangement of the white matter. Perhaps it was an infarction.

Well, by the superhuman exertions of Inspector Bucket I had been tracked to my lair, and a doctor descended upon me the next morning, and asked me a few more questions. But he was the one of whom I have spoken as having given a worthy brain to earnest work, and having so signally condemned asylums and delusions. No man could have been more kind and wise. He might well have been deceived into thinking me mad, I think; for by this time, with voices, delusions, visions, and all the nonsense drummed into me, I had well-nigh begun to think myself so. I had hardly any clothes with me, as I wandered with the impression that there must be a full-stop somewhere near. I had not brushed my hair; I looked utterly dazed, and had taken refuge in the smallest room on the topmost story of one of our largest hostelries. If I had been charged as an escaped convict, answer had been difficult. He was not deceived, though, and ordered the rest of mind and body which is sometimes as vain a prescription as port wine and sea-air to the wasted pauper. Failing better roads to it, I was sent off to a hydropathic establishment in the north, once more in the charge of a body-servant, who was not to lose sight of me upon the road. _Ay de mi!_ all the hopeless old story was coming on again.

I knew that palace of the water-cure well. I had known pleasant days there in happier times, when I thought I would go thither and bathe for no special reason, and had amused myself much with the whims and oddities of the place; all the people 'going to Gravesend by water,' as Sir George Rose used to say. It had been the property of a kindly Scotchman since gone, who has left me pleasant memories of his home-circle and his private stock of 'whusky,' which he administered to me freely at night, when the water-washers were gone to bed, after instructing me in the theoretic virtues of abstinence in his council-chamber in the morning. Now, like other places of the kind, it had lost its home-shape, and pa.s.sed into the impersonal hands of a company. The presiding medical authority was now a different man. I wonder if he dreams of me sometimes? The first night after my reaching the place a crash came. I could bear this espial no longer; and the dreams of dead dear ones had become so vividly mixed with the nightmare horrors inherited from (what shall I call the asylum?) Pecksniff Hall, that I never knew half I was doing. The professional name for dreams, as I said before, is 'visions.' Dreaming that a warder was upon me, and that a ghost was telling me to run, I jumped up in my sleep and rolled over the nearest banisters. The fall was not severe, and the 'desperate attempt' failed; for I only broke a rib and stove in my breastbone, which proved afterwards handy for the warders to work upon. I was put to bed for a time and taken some care of; and before long was able to drive and stroll about again, and join in lawn-tennis. But the dream-fears and the daily terrors haunted me still; and I still shrank from everybody. At last came the realisation of my constant fear; and I fell into a fit of light-headed wandering, and began calling out at intervals various silly things. What should have been done was to nurse me and pour wine down my throat, and apply the common means of homely restoration. What was done was this: the stout bathmen and servants of the place were sent to hold me down; and I was gagged, and left gagged, till the blood ran down from my mouth. Then came two strange doctors as before, of whose names and faces I am ignorant, and were instructed by my 'friends,' I suppose, to sign a certificate. I was then given a strong dose of opium, and a summons was sent to the Master of Pecksniff Hall, who despatched two stout warders northward by the train, for the impounding of my Herculean frame. One was the good-natured colonial; the other a man whom I held in especial aversion, a fat ex-footman, who afterwards reported his work as 'very good fun,' and had a particular apt.i.tude, when I was lying helpless in bed, for jumping on my breastbone and half throttling me. A fancied resemblance in his moony countenance to an historical face made me, when I was one day dreamily contemplating him from bed, connect him vaguely with the Orton family; and among the _dramatis personae_ of my imagination I knew him as young Orton, and whiled away some of my hours by constructing romances about him and the Tichborne inheritance. There was another man, affectionately known to a circle of admiring friends as 'Birdie,' who was so like him that it made me rather angry not to be able to make up my mind which was the truer claimant. It was, at any rate, something to do. But 'Birdie' was good-natured also in his way, though fond of practical joking. I disliked his way of dipping my hairbrush in the basin in the morning, when I was too weak to remonstrate, and using it on his own bullet-head under my eyes; but I bear him no grudge. One of his amus.e.m.e.nts did me some harm; for he had a way of whipping up things in the room and running off with them--to puzzle me, I suppose, laughing all the time. He performed this feat once with a new antimaca.s.sar; and from that moment, coupled with the indescribable disorder and entire absence of all visible supervision over the attendants, which reigned in the big madhouse, it created in my mind a notion that there was more dishonesty in the place than might be. It was a 'delusion,' of course, and the 'notes' must have had much to say to it; the more as, when it became known, some of the men would play on it as on an instrument, as I fear they are but too apt to play in ignorance, having but too much opportunity so to do, on the weaknesses and fancies of the poor people in their charge. The thing is not worth many words, but it is a very fair instance of the way in which this abominable system tends to create the very things which it is supposed to cure. My reflections upon the Orton family--quite as much of a delusion as the other--are written in no notes but my own.

The warders' faces met mine in the morning; and in a wild opium-trance, acting on the brain at its weakest, I was removed to my prison again. Once during the journey, I learn, I spoke, and once only, when the sight of my colonial indulging in a pot of beer woke the healthy British nature to solicit a drink I do not remember it; for I remember nothing but a confused succession of trains and platforms, till I woke to semi-consciousness in the asylum--to find myself lying on the ground on my back, with a doctor on one side and my old servant--returned from India in the interval--upon the other, contemplating me. This was described as a 'fit'--vaguely. I must have been, like the Yankee of the story, 'a whale at fits,' for I had them of all kinds--epileptic; epileptoid--'toid'

meaning nothing, but being subst.i.tuted when the first 'diagnosis' revealed itself in its native silliness; paralytic (in the left arm, when I had lain on it in bed for some days and rather numbed it); and any others that came handy. I wish I could see those 'notes;' they must be wonderful. But as in the mult.i.tude of counsellors is wisdom, in the mult.i.tude of maladies is safety. So began my second term--of eight months' imprisonment. Was ever such a story told? There shall be but very little more of it.

VII.

As I look back at the first chapter of this story of mine, and see that I wrote down that my experience had nothing in it especially painful, I wonder at the apt.i.tude of human nature to forget and forgive, where it is only permitted. Now that I have brought my mind to bear upon the details, they seem to me fraught with a quite exceptional pain. It needed time and thought for me to measure, in anything like its depth and height, the wrong that was done to me. Oblivion alone shall remain when this my closing chapter is finished; for forgiveness has in my case been made impossible, since.

Si l'effort est trop grand pour la faiblesse humaine De pardonner les maux qui nous viennent d'autrui, epargne-toi du moins le tourment de la haine: a defaut du pardon, laisse venir l'oubli!

When I was first imprisoned among madmen, after the piece of childish folly which had in it no object, if it had any at all, but to make those come and nurse me whose clear duty it was to do so, I was so ill and broken that, had he been in my case,

Mine enemy's dog, Though he had bit me, should have stood that night Against my fire.

The second time it was perhaps more cruel still. And the thing was done under cover of the lunacy-laws. If they protect mere heartlessness so, what must they do in cases where purposes directly evil are to be served?

The sadness of this story is affecting me in spite of myself, and makes me anxious to bring it to an end. The second sentence was the same thing over again, except that I knew that I was in an asylum, and resigned myself to feel that I had no chance of escaping. n.o.body cared. Why should I escape?

I had a few visitors the first time. When they came, a well-set luncheon-table and a good bottle of wine replaced the garbage which we were too often expected to consume, and the unwalled grounds and pretty gardens of Pecksniff Hall were suggestive of a country house in the olden time. My lawyer came to see me and eat mutton--a good fellow, of whom it is pleasant to think, in the bitterness which will mix with my ink as I go on. He happened to bring with him the first copy of the 'World' that I had seen, and left it with me as an odd link with its forgotten G.o.dmother. I, with a warder, saw him off by the train, and wondered rather why I should not go too. I had not realised the asylum, and talked to him only of money-matters which had been troubling me. The second time I was too far gone; I wanted no visits, and cared for none, though day after day I woke from my troubled dreams--not all bad now, but some singularly beautiful--with a feeling that surely somebody would rescue me before night. How ill I was after that opium-journey, and whether dying or not, I do not know. The master said that I was, and after the gagging and drugging it is very probable. It was on a hot night in June that I lay down in that evil place again, in the farthest room in a remote wing of the building, between two keepers, who threw themselves one on each side of me, and held me close between them the hot night through, snoring out their own heavy sleep, or waking to hold me closer if I tried to stir. I happened to light afterwards upon the 'notes' of one of them upon this night, in which he reported me as having had some 'bad turns'--of violence, I suppose--in pain as I still was from my fall, and from the gag; opium-dazed and desolate, weaker than a child. For days and nights this went on with a constant change of warders more or less rough and hard. They were told off to watch me three or four at a time, because of my dangerous qualities, and my stupid efforts to get free from them. Among themselves they laughed at it, knowing my weakness; and the smallest boy among them--for there was a stock of small and ugly boys on the staff--would lead me about with his little finger. But sometimes a detachment of them would carry me to my bedroom or keep me down in bed, tearing my clothes in the process. To account for deficiences in my wardrobe (of which each of us had a list, like a schoolboy's) it was said in the 'notes' that I tore them up myself--a 'well-known sign of insanity!' How I dreaded that 'north room'! It was in the oldest corner of the house, cold and hot, and rat-haunted; and much as Mrs. Gamp and her friend must have seemed to their dying-charge, the keepers seemed to me, as they crooned in the corners through my semi-delirium.

It seemed to me that the doctors had wondrous little to say to it. They came to see me now and then, for a minute or two, in my bed. The house doctor, who so impressed my friend, had lived for years in the place, and seemed to have no ideas beyond it. He kept dreadful little things in bottles, and noted conscientiously, by a machine under my window--which looked like the desk of an orchestral conductor--the amount of daily and nightly rainfall. We must all of us do something, I suppose. In the summer he was a great archer, and strutted about with a bow and quiver. A few of the patients joined in the sport--a melancholy lord, who never spoke, but was 'my lorded' by everybody much after the fas.h.i.+on of saner circles, and one or two others. I tried it once, and was rather gratified to find that, though I had never used bow and arrow before, I scored better than the house doctor. But the man-monkey was allowed to try his hand too, and played hideous tricks with his arrows, and grimaced so that I could not face the amus.e.m.e.nt more. Of the cricket I had enough on my first visit, and would not run the gauntlet again. To some sort of distraction I was occasionally driven by despair; for the const.i.tutionals round the mile-circuit of the grounds, or among the lanes and roads, were maddening.

The Sunday walks were the worst; when the British villager was out on holiday, and gaped and wondered at us. In the winter months I made occasional attempts to follow the pack of harriers which was kept up for our benefit--which at all events amused the warders and country-siders a good deal. I was never fond of harriers, and this was not, perhaps, the place or time to acquire the taste. Half-an-hour of the muddy fields tired out the weak body and head, and aggravated my weary dreams. But it gave a brief s.p.a.ce of comparative freedom; and I was able to a.s.sociate more with a good young fellow who came to the place as companion to the man-monkey, and showed a decided preference for my society. His berth cannot have been pleasant; and he found in my room his only refuge from the general disorder of the house and attendants, though even there we could not escape from the one tune which one of them was always beating to death on an ancient piano in one of the public rooms, to the behoof of the broken nerves collected there. I had been removed from the north room then; I suppose in favour of some more violent newcomer. I found, too, another pleasant companion in an officer who had seen much foreign service, and liked talk. He wondered why he was there. He had been ill, he told me. We met first at the billiard-table, and he came up to me at once, and said that he knew my face, and must have met me at Carlsbad, as he had. He was well enough to shrug his shoulders over the matter, and even to find amus.e.m.e.nt in studying the delusions of the madmen, and talking them over.

He had been knocked so much about the world, he said, that he cared little how it all ended; and he had no special desire to meet again the friends who had imprisoned him. I do not wonder. He may have been mad; but I saw him often, and his was the best imitation of sanity I ever saw. At all events it did him small good to be there. We followed the harriers and ate sandwiches together, and speculated why we had been singled out to be crushed by this tower of Siloam. Once, feeling a thought stronger, I wrote a letter to an old literary friend. It was very harmless, for I did not care to complain; but the friend was a member of a well-known legal family, and his name on the envelope caused a sensation. It was believed to be in my officer's handwriting; and he was asked why he had been writing to a lawyer, and what about. Why the heads of an asylum should be afraid of their best friends the lawyers, I do not know. But it seems they are. However, I do not exaggerate. My letter was sent.

The lunatic harriers would make a chapter by themselves; but I have done with them. I began to believe at last that, in the confusion of the whole business, dogs, doctors, keepers, patients, and huntsmen were all going Hamlet's road together. I would give a good deal--prejudice apart--to give some next friends and Head-shakers (the Marcelluses and Bernardos of society--'We could, an if we would--') a few turns with those unearthly hounds. How I pa.s.sed my evenings, as how I pa.s.sed my days, save in an occasional study of old novels, an occasional hour at lunatic billiards, an occasional game at draughts or chess with anyone with brains enough to know the moves, I do not know. I was too weak of head and too ill to study, as I have said, or to shake the burrs from off me. On the Sundays I had five o'clock tea with the Master--the only patient so privileged, I think; but he usually talked of one Dr. Blanc and the inferiority of French asylums, failing the elder Grossmith, and I was none the better.

Twice did a younger doctor--one of the family and of the firm, for Pecksniff Hall was quite a fact in county society, and had been so for some generations--ask me to dine with him at his house, apart also from the asylum. I found him a good fellow enough, and his wife very kindly; and I despair in conveying to my readers how pleasant it was to dine like a gentleman at a pleasant table. No other patient came; and, as he phrased it, we 'sank the shop.' Did it never occur to him that the 'shop' and I were rather incongruous? He was fond of burlesques, and he was a good hand at billiards; and he looked like a straightforward heavy-cavalry officer.

The princ.i.p.al informed me that he received me for the second time against the wishes of his family. I was ill and sentimental, and thought how kind the old man was, and how hard his family must have been to grudge me the only home which I seemed likely to get. I have hoped sometimes since that the family took a view of their own upon the case, and had no wish to make part with mine; but I do not know.

An entertainer, collaborating with a lady-novelist, brought a little play called 'Cups and Saucers' to be enacted in the dining-room. A merry little play, I thought, and the warders and servants liked it well enough. But when I had watched it for a time I retreated to my solitude, for it was more than I could bear. The lunatic next me dilated in a loud voice upon the price of potatoes, which was wide of the plot. He was a wealthy lunatic, and had taken me out for a drive a few days before, had bared his 'biceps' for my admiration--it was even less bicipitous than mine--and waxed very wroth because I asked for his 'Daily Telegraph,' when he said he had not done with it. Rumours of war were then in the air; and though it was before the days when Jingo had become a power, he was more intensely and demonstratively Jingo than the flower of the music-halls. If the Home Secretary has profited at all by the vials of scorn poured upon his head by Mr. Forbes, in his spirited 'Fiasco of Cyprus,' he must have enough to do just now in learning the geography of Persia and the Euphrates Valley; but he might yet find the time to do that imprisoned Jingo a good turn. Where is the Conservative watchfulness that leaves such a vote as this to be lost to humanity? There came a conjuror with a Greek name, whom I avoided; there came a child-harpist, with a concert, called little Ada Somebody, whom I would not go and hear; and there were various parties on the 'ladies' side,' which I could not bring myself to face.

That ladies' side had for me all the odd fascination of the unknown. It occupied half the large house; and there was a little colony of ladies besides in a pretty little house with a soft poetic name, in the grounds hard by. The native gallantry of the doctors appeared to keep them constantly on the ladies' side. If ever I asked for one of them, he was always there, and would see me when he came back. My friend the officer penetrated the mysteries, and described the little card-parties and musical evenings as something very strange. I could not be induced to go, and the record is lost. But I met the poor women in my daily walks, and about the grounds, and learned to know many of their lack-l.u.s.tre faces.

One of them, in a Bath-chair, accosted me once suddenly in the public road as we crossed, with one of the worst words in the English language, and sent me dazed and dreaming 'home.' The female warders accompanied them; smart young women with a setting of earrings, many of them, who might have been contracted for in the gross by Spiers and Pond; who would exchange many a friendly wink and sign with their counterparts of the male side as they pa.s.sed. From what ranks they are recruited I do not know, and have no special wish to ask. The sadness of the thing was very deep; for, knowing what we men bore, I speculated much what these caged women might have to bear. The law for us is the law for them. The nervous maladies which attack us, attack tenfold their more delicate organisation; and they are no safer from wrong or selfishness than we. How many times over, to name one danger alone, may the fancies of puerperal fever be miscalled madness, and treated--in these places and among these companions--so? Our wives and our sisters are not very safe from the Bastille, as things now are.

My time went on. During the bitter winter months the asylum was in the hands of workmen, under repair. The great echoing corridors were being papered and painted, the rooms renewed, the chapel decorated in the approved fas.h.i.+on. The workmen were at work by night as well as by day; and the patients slunk about the pa.s.sages in greatcoats, and warmed themselves at casual fires. I thought that a better time might have been chosen, perhaps; and the confusion seemed to me worse confounded; but that is no affair of mine. 'Would G.o.d it were night!' I thought in the morning; and 'Would G.o.d it were morning!' at night--when the warders returned with a rush from their hour out, filled the pa.s.sages with talk and noise and oaths, and with much ceremony brought bed-candles at ten. The plate was beautiful; and some of the candlesticks so big that I used sometimes to wonder whether my keeper for the nonce--they were told off to different rooms every night, to prevent us from growing too dependent upon anybody, I suppose--was going to precede me backwards to my bedroom. The common breakfast began at eight, and the common dinner was at one. There were two or three different mess tables for those who lived in common; and the rest ate apart, each in his own room. For a long time I used the last privilege; but I gathered at length a sort of desperate courage, and thought it better to face my kind as much as I could. Besides, at the common table there was, on the whole, enough to eat; while the private meals I found singularly Barmecidal and scraggy. I suppose that, like Oliver Twist, I might have asked for more. But I was afraid of everything and everybody, and, fearing a similar result, refrained. The faces at the board changed little; for ours was practically a place for incurables.

Kindly Death changed them sometimes, as I have said. Some of those whom I remembered during my first period had changed visibly for the worse, like the poor singer of the beer-song, who seemed to me always struggling with a sense of wrong, which he could not speak. In the public asylums, I am told, cures are many. They were not so with us. There were times when patients were removed to some other asylum--for the worse, it may be; for I have said that Pecksniff Hall has the best of testimonials from the Commissioners; but, with the exception of the friend of whom I wrote, I remember no case of liberation but one. There was a clergyman confined among us, whose wife took lodgings in the village by. She was with him every day, watched him every day, walked with him every day, and never seemed to me to leave him till she took him away. Brave little woman, how I honoured her! for her nerve must have been tried enough. If these papers of mine make one relation think, as much as I can hope to do will have been done. The Master claimed much credit with me for this cure. May he deserve it! for he must need something to write upon the credit side.

The Commissioners I saw once during my second confinement. They came down, like a wolf on the fold, unexpected. Their approach is, I believe, always concealed from the patients, for fear of upsetting their minds.

They came with return-tickets from town, good for one day. They made a sudden incursion into my room--two or three, I forget which, but one was a short lame gentleman who asked questions: Was I comfortable? Had I headaches?--(well, I had that day, from the paint)--and did I hear voices?

My chair-covers were being removed at the time, and I had no s.p.a.ce to think, much less speak. Twice in the day afterwards I begged of the warders to be allowed to see them again, but neither them nor doctor of course did I see. I say that I was never mad; and there is not an honest reader of this story who will not believe me. And that is all I saw of her Majesty's Commissioners in Lunacy. Was I wrong in calling this a farce? I have nothing to suggest to them. Where work is ill done, criticism may do good. Where it is not done at all, criticism is silent. '_Ou il n'y a rien, le roi perd ses droits._' I wrote afterwards, when I was free, to one of them, who had been once a friend of my own, as I thought it my duty to write. He was then _functus officio_ certainly, and well out of it. But he never answered my letter; which I have no doubt he put complacently by, as a madman's nonsense. It must be a comfortable berth enough where officers and doctors and lawyers and relatives are all in a tale, and, in the world below here, there are few to find you out.

As the man to whom I was now to owe my freedom said, this must soon have led to softening of the brain. The strain had become terrible. The belief in the existence of a system of organised pillage among this undisciplined crew, which might well have possessed a stronger head than mine was then, was wearing me out, though I tried to argue myself out of it. Some of the men played on it, as I said. And I was becoming too thoroughly ill and nerveless under this trial to be much more than a sort of automaton. I even began to have a sort of feeling that this was my home, and that I might be turned out to wander again when they grew tired of me. When the relation of whom I have spoken came to stay in a neighbouring town--not at the asylum, happily for me--I was allowed to spend the day like a boy with an _exeat_, and even in my illness resented the house-doctor's objections to giving me too much leave from school. Conscious of fair powers of heart and brain, the paltry unworthiness of the whole thing jarred me even more than greater sins; and it does so still. How ill I was may be judged from the fact that I did not press, scarcely even wish, for my removal. But the skilful doctor who came to see me--I have reached nearly the last in my story now--who had rescued others besides me, practically insisted upon it; and one morning I received at the asylum the news that I was to go. I could not believe it--could not take it in; thought myself permanently 'on the establishment.' The doctors grinned sardonic disgust; intimated that a serious danger was threatening society, and hinted an _au revoir_. So did the warders, smiling generally, and holding out expectant hands. I had been allowed a little pocket-money when I was good, but had not much to give. I have not been inclined, upon reflection, to be lavish of donations since. The last report of the 'attendants' was--whether in connexion with this tightness of my purse-strings or not I cannot say--that they had never seen me worse. So the 'treatment' had done me no good, at all events. My new guardian took me to his house by the sea, and, with his wife and daughter, gave me for a time a real home, and was something more than kind. He had not much a.s.sistance. From one near relative abroad he received an abusive letter; from the Master of Pecksniff Hall an angry warning that he was taking into his house 'a suicidal and homicidal patient, the most dangerous in his establishment.' But a few days before the man had made me his guest at his own tea-table, alone with his wife and young daughters. How does he reconcile the two things? The charge was cruel, and nearly robbed me of the hard-won home. My rescuer believed no word of it; but his wife was naturally frightened, and for a night or two a new watcher slept at my door, and I had to submit to a new cross-examination from two more doctors for the edification of the Commission. They said that my eye wandered, and drew up such a certificate that I, who saw it, succeeded in having it sent back to them. Without seeing me again, they mildly drew up another in quite different terms, which must be the last doc.u.ment recorded and docketed in my case. But my sanity now vindicated itself, and I was free, in spite of the protest which, by the side of the valuable opinion of the warders, robs Pecksniff Hall of all t.i.tle to my 'cure.'

I had still much to bear. For a long time, as I have said, I was represented as under 'delusions' about my relatives. The fact that they put me in an asylum, I presume, is scarcely one. Circ.u.mstances were as much against me as ever, and light-headedness would still threaten to recur, while asylum-dreams, of course, haunted me still more. They have left me at last; but I had to fight them down, and did this time--in Whose strength I have ventured, as I am bound, to say. I travelled again, and grew better, forcing myself to new interest in the scenes and people about me. At last, and in a happy hour for me, I married; though I had almost made up my mind that I never could. One relative wrote me an impertinent letter about this 'extraordinary step;' which is, as the young lady says in the comedy, 'a thing of frequent occurrence in the metropolis.' Another wrote to me within a week of my marriage to threaten me with the possibility of being shut up again. It frightened my young wife for some time, she has told me since; but she is a brave woman, and held her tongue. I next found myself charged with 'intemperate habits'--about as near the mark as forgery; and the silliness took away the sting. But it was not nice. It is better to atone for wrong than to excuse it by worse, I think; but it is a matter of taste.

'_Liberavi animam meam._' My tale is told, as it was my clear duty to tell it, at the cost of some pain. Let those whose duty it is to mend this wickedness do theirs, or at their peril leave it undone. 'Mr. Hardress Cregan,' says Miles, in the 'Colleen Bawn,' 'I make you the present of the contempt of a rogue.' And, with infinite disgust and scorn, and small hope of better things, I dedicate this true story of the Bastilles of merrie England to all whom it may concern.

'L'ENVOI.'