in my very weakness, like a whipped child. He was kindly, but too big, and I was afraid of him. How many fears of the same sort must harass and perplex all those darkened lives is another of the sealed mysteries of the English Bastilles. I associated him so closely with my first coming; I remembered with a vision at once so dim and clear how he had curiously examined me from the opposite seat of the carriage as the train sped on in the darkening winter evening, through what country I knew not, to what destination I had no care to ask. When the doctor whom I had left had hinted where I was to go, I had failed to understand him. Had he told me in more direct words, I could not have believed in such a thing being done; I could not have believed in its possibility, as on looking back it baffles my understanding now. I have read many tales and many histories which turn upon the abuse of lettres de cachet in the famous ante-Revolutionary days. Will anybody tell me the difference? It seems to me that all that could be done by their means can be done ‘under certificates’ here and now, and legally justified afterwards over and over again. The Bastille itself could scarcely hold its prisoners more closely than the ‘establishment’ wherein I lived; and scarcely harder could it have been for any echo of complaint or suffering to reach the outer world. Buried and forgotten we lay there, like dead men out of mind. Of the farcical visits of inspection made by her Majesty’s Commissioners I shall have something presently to say. Their manner of discharging their solemn duty is, to my mind, in the whole round of wrong the worst feature of all.

Whilst I was being thus spirited away through the heart of London, with scores of warm-hearted friends within unconscious hail who would have raised a riot to save me if they had known anything of the truth, I knew as little of the fate before me as the inconvenient kinsman on his road to the old Bastille. Had I known, weak as I was, I should have resisted; and with what result? What is the result to those who do righteously resist? For there must be some who do. On my second apprehension, which I shall describe in its place, I should have known. But I was drugged by authority, as effectually and deliberately as ever was heroine of a novel, and brought back to my prison from the North of England under the influence of opium. More of this in time. Let me return to my first journey. There were my warders winking and blinking; my private domestic pouring into the ears of the other, who listened with the indifference of a man accustomed to the ways of nameless beings like me, his own version of my private history, and making grabs at me in the dark when we came to a tunnel, to create a prejudice in my favour. I remember dimly wondering what it was about, expecting the men to handcuff me, vaguely dreaming of the charms of bed and of a ‘home,’ speculating somewhat why I had none. Of that journey I remember little more, except eating savoury jelly at Waterloo Station—so oddly do trifles impress one in the most critical moments of life. The next turn of the kaleidoscope pictures me seated in an armchair, just before the episode of the pudding-eater, I suppose, interviewed by the ancient head of the asylum, who, having me there under certificate from my family, had no opinion to pronounce on my mental condition, but simply to accept me as a madman, worth a round sum a year to him, and be thankful. But for a certain episode which I shall in due course relate, I might not have found the man out. He was quite stupid, and had so muddled his venerable brain with the contemplation—I will not say the study—of insanity, that, after five minutes’ conversation, any two apothecaries from anywhere would have ‘certificated’ him at once. He knew nothing on earth about me; saw me for the first time under conditions not perhaps exactly favourable to an impartial judgment; and afterwards, as I have before told, paid me occasional flying visits, which he spent chiefly in nodding and winking at me in a knowing manner, and treating the few words which fell from me as so many excellent jokes. He had heard that I was theatrically given, and humoured my shattered intelligence by taking every opportunity of telling me that he had once taken his daughters to the Adelphi to see ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’ or ‘Nicholas Nickleby’—I forget which—followed invariably by a little anecdote of one Grossmith, an old ‘entertainer,’ who was wont to imitate Charles Mathews (whose loss we are regretting now) so well that when Mathews once met him in the train and heard him talk he said, ‘If you are not Mathews, you must be Grossmith.’ I think that was the story; but I grew rather addled over it at last, and am not quite sure. Grossmith the younger, who has since that time made for himself some name upon the stage, came twice from London to ‘entertain’ us. An old stage-lander, I seldom remember feeling so severely critical. ‘Hyperæsthesia,’ I think, is the medical alias for the quickening of the nervous perceptions which so curiously accompanies, and yet contrasts with, the odd sense of unreality with which bloodlessness of brain invests everything. I listened to the performer’s humours like a man in a dream, with a bitter sense of unconscious revolt as I recalled many happy evenings at the play, and went drearily to bed, wondering more than usual how it was all to end. By an odd flicker of the old flame, I remember feeling as if it were incumbent upon me to go ‘behind the scenes’ and present myself, but could not make up my mind to it. What would the actor have thought had he come behind the scenes with me that night, I wonder! Some months afterwards I was watching him from a stage-box through the oddities of the ‘Sorcerer,’ and it brought back to me with a shock the fearful place where I had seen him last, and made me throw an involuntary look round me to see if any warder was on the watch. The feelings of fear and shame—for it has in one’s own despite a sort of shame about it—that the experience left behind, died slow and hard. And a chance association like this would curiously awake them.

But I am keeping my old doctor waiting. He looked and moved, and I dare say tried to believe himself, the absolute incarnation of respectable Benevolence. The frock-coat, dark suit, and white cravat in the initial stage of strangulation, which are to so many people a sort of badge of a doctor’s degree in divinity, law, or medicine, and the hall-mark of a good heart, carried out the illusion. He began to do good-natured things at intervals; I suppose from a spasmodic sense that he might as well try to cure a patient sometimes, instead of leaving them all entirely to the salutary effects of association. He once proposed to go through a course of Greek Testament readings with me, and we accomplished an entire chapter, but dropped the cure at that point. My power of reading Greek at sight appeared to impress him much, as by force of contrast with his insane patients it well might. But it failed to incite him to further efforts for my recovery and release. The Grossmith anecdote, to be taken at intervals, was an easier prescription. Though he had taken very kindly, however, to the work which he had accepted in life, he yet never gave me the impression of being altogether ‘undisturbed by conscientious qualms,’ and of having been able to silence the monitor which must have pleaded at times so loudly within him. He was one of those men who never look one straight in the face. And though he had constructed a little