One great art in this management was that of Mrs. Allen’s making her useful as her deputy in every thing in the house, either in matters of a household nature, or in attending upon others. And notwithstanding her own miserable state, no one was ever more qualified for a nurse, or better understood every thing connected with the arrangements of the table; and her very perfection in all these matters, had, before Mrs. Allen came, been the cause of an increase rather than a relief to her misery, for she became the object of great jealousy and dislike to my housekeepers and matrons, on this score: but now it became a source of employment, amusement, and diversion. Though she long continued to possess, for the most part, this disposition to fall into the same miserable state, yet it never afterwards degenerated into that dreadful agony and distraction I have described. At times it ceased altogether, and her more happy state supervened, when she was full of hope and self-esteem, of life and activity, the very antipodes of her former state. But it is altogether astonishing how both these states were lessened and kept in check by Mrs. Allen’s manners, combining the most inflexible firmness with admirable tact and good nature. When all her almost exhaustless fund of sympathy failed, it was always found a sufficient check, and at once to call forth our patient’s powers of self-control, for Mrs. Allen to say that she really could not bear the association of her miserable state any longer, and that they must separate; and it was very seldom necessary to hold out the threat, that she must be removed into the gallery and back part of the house. Perseverance in this system of unwearied and perhaps unequalled kindness, gradually mitigated and diminished these alternate states of excitement and depression; thus shewing to demonstration, that in this way, with the aid of medical treatment, the excitement of the depressing and the exhilirating passions may be checked and restrained, so that in time they may regain their due equilibrium;—that instead of these cases degenerating, as they have almost always done, into hopeless cases of mania or melancholia, and often terminating in complete dementia, they, by this system, might in process of time regain the due equipoise, or the relative and appropriate share of the exercise of the different functions of mind, and be brought, as in the case just described, to repossess the greatest of blessings, the healthy action of the feelings and faculties in the discharge of those duties which constitute alike the object, the usefulness, and the happiness of her present existence.