"What a nice young man that is!--so pleasant and kind! Nice-looking too, though a trifle old-fashioned and heavy; not like--ah, well, never mind. But much too good to mope away his life in this wretched old place, anyhow." And when George reached his rooms he smiled to himself, and said: "Well, if that little talk, and those little compliments, have the result of making Miss Marshall show any extra amount of kindness to my poor _maman_, my time will not have been ill bestowed." George Wainwright was tolerably correct in all he had said regarding Madame Vaughan, though he had but an imperfect knowledge of her history. At the time when her mental malady first rendered it necessary that she should be placed under restraint, the private lunatic asylums of England were in a very different condition from what they are now. They were for the most part held by low-born ignorant men, who derived their entire livelihood from the sums of money paid for the maintenance of the unfortunate wretches confided to their charge, and whose gains were consequently greater in proportion to the manner in which they ignored or refused the requirements of their inmates. A person calling himself a physician, and perhaps in possession of some purchased degree, hired at a small stipend and non-resident, looked in occasionally, asked a few questions, and signed certificates destined to hoodwink official eyes, which in those days never saw too clearly at the best of times. But the staff of keepers, male and female, was always numerous and efficient. Those were the merry days of the iron collar and the broad leather bastinado, of the gag and the cold bath, of the irons and the whipping-post. They did not care much about what the Lunacy Commissioners did, or wrote, or exacted, in those days, and each man did what he thought best for himself. The date of the Commissioners' visits, which then were few and far between, were accurately known long beforehand; the "medical attendant" was on the spot; the patients, such as were visible, were tricked up into a proper state of cleanliness and order; and the others were duly hidden away until the authorities had departed. The licensing was a farce, only to be exceeded in absurdity by the other regulations; and villany, blackguardism, brutality, and chicanery reigned supreme.