institution. The silent members of our corporation were very numerous; whether they were silent always, or whether by degrees the habit crept upon them in that fearful mockery of companionship, will not be known here. I have said that for the first few days of my first imprisonment—to take up again the thread of my personal story—I was too ill and weak to observe or to care for anything. I think that I must have been in bed for a few days, dying alone; but that I do not remember. After that immediate danger had passed, I must have been one of the silent for some time; for I well remember the expression of astonishment which came over the faces of some of the warders in attendance when a letter was one day brought to me in the common room which had forced the passage somehow, and I answered to my name. The correspondence of the prisoners is conducted under difficulties. All letters, written or received, pass through the doctor’s hands, whether opened or not I do not know; and those that they write go through him, not to those to whom they are addressed, but to the persons responsible for their imprisonment. There lies another royal road to the discovery of truth. A fellow-prisoner, who became a friend of mine in prison (it is the shortest and truest word to use), who was as sane as I, but, happily for him, stronger in health, conquered this difficulty by writing letters to every quarter whence he thought help might come, and posting them by various contrivances in the country villages when he took his walks and drives abroad. He won his freedom; and the first use he made of it was to bestir himself to win me mine. Does this read like ‘England in the nineteenth century,’ I wonder? Or need we go to the Alfred Hardys and Mrs. Archbolds of Charles Reade to tell us again that fiction is not so strange as truth? He imagined; I describe. Which is the stronger?

When I first broke silence on this communication from the outer world—it was from a club friend, I remember, giving me some account of old literary and dramatic mates, who seemed to have passed into another sphere for me—I was stupidly observing my surroundings from the depths of an old armchair. The ‘Dowager Gibbs’ was shuffling and chanting up and down the room; the patriarch was puffing at his screw; the man-monkey was howling and gesticulating, and tearing up the ‘Illustrated;’ the postman was grinding out indecencies, which haunt me, in a harsh strident voice; the good fellow, who is safe in harbour now, was muttering a series of prescriptions of potassium, bromides, and iodides, and other kindred horrors (he had been an eminent man in his time, I heard, and had suddenly broken down—how I hated the warders for their patronage of him!); the lawyer was making notes in a red pocket-book, or stealing from a plate surreptitious gingerbreads, of which he was very fond; and the whole Witches’ Sabbath was in full play. The keepers told off to watch us were holding more consecutive, but not more edifying, conversation about horses and bets and races, which appear to absorb their faculties much as they do those of many higher minds, varying it with local gossip and bad language, and much rough horse-play at our crazy expense. I wonder sometimes what effect it might have had upon them, if it had dawned upon them that among their unconscious charges there was a ‘chiel amang them takin’ notes,’ quite involuntary, but photographic in truth at least.

I should have had no place in that common room, I believe, except when I wished it; for I was on the footing of a ‘first-class patient,’ and had a private room of my own. Those who had not had no choice but to grow worse year by year from the enforced companionship that I have written down. But I was too ill to have wish or power of my own. I was absorbed for the time in the servant I have more than once mentioned, who was my master, and knew and rejoiced in it. He was soon tired of his duty, which was to keep me ‘company’ (Heaven save the mark!) in my room, and preferred to transfer me to the larger, where he might consort with his mates, and I with mine. The chief doctor, when I was at my worst, came to see me once a day. And I well remember the threats with which my ‘attendant’ would deter me, ill and broken as I was, from complaining of the life I had to lead. If he had known my illness and powerlessness to the full, he would have had no need to do it, for I did not know what I had to tell. But well do I remember how some words seemed to be struggling within me for utterance during the five minutes allotted me, to which I vaguely looked forward with a sort of daily hope of something; something which came not—justice, I fancy. I was tongue-tied by misery and illness, and my ‘servant’ stood behind the door while the doctor was with me. And so the days went by. Here I must ask my readers to remember that my brain was very weak, and that, as far as these warders are concerned, I am trying to disentangle the literal facts from my memory as exactly as I may. They are supposed to be the qualified nurses of the sick; they are men of the most ignorant class, without one single qualification for that duty—discharged soldiers, sailors, footmen. And they are the absolute masters of these asylums (of which I, remember, inhabited what has been called the best), and of the lives and liberties imprisoned there.

IV.

My first acquaintance with the warder whom I regarded—I do not very well know why—as a sort of master-gaoler among his fellows, was made upon my road to the asylum. I was escorted to London from the forest by my adhesive body-servant, and by the young doctor whose charge I was leaving, who had formally certified my insanity. As I have said, he told me when we parted that he held the step taken to be wrong, and wished it to be avoided. I was ill, he thought, and needed care. I fail to see, under these circumstances, how he was justified in signing the certificate. He was young, unskilled, a stranger to me but a week or two before, and I had lived with his wife and family. Whether any pressure was put upon him I do not know, and had rather not enquire. It is enough for my purpose quietly to state that I am to this hour in the dark as to the details of the business, and that I was consigned to a madhouse, against his will, on the order of a doctor who did not believe me mad. Three authorities on lunacy had stated but a short time before that I was in no danger of being so. Nor was I—till the madhouse made the danger. Such is the law.

He escorted me to London, and we parted there. At the terminus the confidential warder met us from the asylum, and took his place. The last I saw of him was that, as he ran fast along the platform, he ‘washed his hands with invisible soap,’ expressively, as of me and my concerns. He guessed something of what he had done, I suppose, though I hope not all; and thought that I was going forth into the outer darkness for evermore. My companions were well fitted to conduct me there. The forbidding personality of my special servant is still at times a presence in my thoughts; and the other afterwards was to haunt me still more. He was a rough, red-bearded, well-looking fellow enough—an old colonial squatter—and, as I remember him, very sufficiently good-natured and good-hearted. He was very fond of beer, and great at collecting shilling novels from all quarters. When in the latter days of my imprisonment he was told off to keep a special watch over me, I grew to shrink from and to dread him,