sufferers, by providing them with attendants or nurses with kind hands and charitable hearts.

With a hopeful prayer that this little history may serve the cause of truth, by enlightening the minds of those who are inquiring after truth, it is dedicated to the candid public by the author.

MOSES SWAN,
Hoosick Falls, N. Y.

TEN YEARS AND TEN MONTHS

IN

LUNATIC ASYLUMS

IN DIFFERENT STATES,

BY

MOSES SWAN,

WITH SOME REMARKS UPON HIS LIFE AND PARENTAGE.

CHAPTER I.

I, Moses Swan, was born in the town of Hoosick, Rensselaer county, New York, March the 4th, 1812. My father was a native of Tyngsborough, Berkshire county, Massachusetts. My mother was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and there lived with her honored parents until my father who being a mechanic, at the age of one and twenty years old, bade his parents good-by and went out into the wide world, like other young men, to seek his fortune, and by the by, as I have often heard him say, he stopped at Greenfield, and worked a few months in the fall, and then and there he became for the first time acquainted with Abigail Clark, who in the course of time became my mother.

From Greenfield, my father crossed the Green mountain, with his pack upon his back, down into North Adams, and whilst I am writing, methinks I see him trudging along with his Yankee pack upon his back, from Adams along to Williamstown, and by the old brick college and on, and on he travels between the rugged rocks of Pownal, and the little river that winds its way along down to old Hoosick. Here he finds himself at Hoosick Four Corners, a pilgrim and a stranger in a strange land, doubtless tired, but yet he presses onward a little farther, to the west part of the town, to what is called the Cross neighborhood, where he hired his board of Captain Ebenezer Cross; here he set up business, for he was a cooper by trade and a practical farmer; here doubtless he labored with industry and economy, having an eye out for this Greenfield Abigail. And a kind providence smiled upon him, and he returned to Greenfield, in search of Abigail Clark, and they were married.

He was now in his twenty-fourth year. This year he was married to her, who then left her parents' house and came with my father to Hoosick; here, by their industry and economy, they soon saved enough to purchase a small farm, about two miles and a half west of Hoosick Falls, where I was born. I was the third son and the fourth child, one of seven sons and a daughter, which my mother bore to my father.

Here upon the old south-western hill of Hoosick, upon the self-same farm my parents lived and toiled together, until my father fell asleep. I well remember the 27th day of February, 1842, when I stood by my father's dying bedside and smoothed his dying pillow and wiped the cold sweat from his brow, yes, I remember very well of closing his eyes in death. I do not, I can't, I must not wish him back to this lower world of sin and sorrow, of toil and woe, though there be joys in Christ for his children, who walk not according to the course of this world.

While I am writing the foremost part of my little narrative, it will be remembered, that I am speaking of things far back in the distance, when things of a temporal kind were far inferior to what they now are. Fifty years has made great changes and improvements in arts and sciences in this country; true it is of Americans as the scripture says, "ye have sought out many inventions."

And while writing, my mind is carried back to my boyhood, some fifty years ago,