Did dreams, perhaps, come to cheer the repose of the unhappy boy? Did the face of his mother and the recollections of his early childhood grow bright in his memory, lighting up the darkness of his intelligence and making his brain pulsate with excitement? Or was it perhaps only a morbid phenomenon, like the jerky movements of a broken wheel, or the index of a machine out of order, swinging idly to and fro? Or was it an unconscious agitation of matter, like the ebb and flow of an unknown and solitary sea? What a contrast between the pleasing emotion which this work roused in us and the sadness of the surroundings! Even that quarter of the city in which the asylum is situated has something characteristic about it, which De Amicis compared to the silence and mystery of an Oriental town. Sometimes, when late on winter evenings I made my way along the deserted streets, I could not even hear my own footsteps as they fell noiselessly on the snow. In the long dormitories of the hospital the dim light of the lamp could not dissipate the gloom in the remote corners of the room. However much care I took to glide softly through the room, in order not to disturb the sleep of those poor wretches, many were yet sitting upright in their beds, with staring eyes, seeming to await my coming and ready to shriek at me as I passed. Others, uncovered and naked, in spite of the winter cold, gazed at me with empty, fixed eyes; while others again, bound, to prevent their injuring either themselves or others in their mad fury, followed my steps with wild glances. What a cheerless sight for a physician, and for me, who came amongst them to study the brain. At the end of these rooms was a little chamber in which I watched my subject. Often I had to interrupt my investigations, and, lamp in hand, go to the most noisy, begging, imploring them to be silent for one minute. It was a waste of breath. Caresses, presents, threats--all were alike of no avail. And when, late at night, discouraged at the failure of my experiments, I left that abode of pain, they were still awake, staring at me with the fixed, impenetrable gaze of a sphynx or the malignant smile of a demon; and when I stepped out into the desolate street again it seemed to me as though I had just escaped from a vision of spectres. V Physiologists may wait a long time before finding a more suitable subject on which to study the circulation of blood in the brain than my Bertino. He had a hole in the very middle of the forehead, that seemed made to allow one to look into the skull as an old Greek philosopher once wished to do with the human heart.