medical men believing in the small-pox theory, actually certified that _half_ of the patients they saw in the lazaretto were not suffering from small-pox at all. My readers from this will be able to form an estimate of the cruel acts perpetrated at the time by ignorant officials, and to judge how, taking the small-pox view of the case, a loathsome disease would be propagated amongst healthy persons—how the innocent and guilty would suffer alike. After this exposure small-pox rapidly died out. The lazaretto is now removed to the west side of the mine, and the buildings surrounded by grounds, twenty-two acres in extent, are stationed on a high plateau on the road to Schmidt’s Drift. At present Kimberley is perfectly free from any cases of this disease. In the beginning of this chapter I made mention of the first lunatic I ever saw in Griqualand West, who, as he belonged to the police, was removed, I believe, to Capetown, but ever since then, both before annexation and since, lunatics as a rule, up to a very short time back, have been left to drag out their weary existences, the victims of heart-curdling neglect, in the common jail. In August, 1885, I took occasion, when speaking on the subject of lunacy, to lay bare before the Kimberley public some of the scenes day by day enacted in their prison (their lunatic asylum?). In the course of a lecture I then delivered, I spoke thus on the subject: “Here in the middle of the nineteenth century, in an era of boasted civilization, the only care we can give our lunatics, except in Capetown and Grahams town, is to herd them with criminals, and to chain and handcuff them with brutal severity, pending an official order for removal, which may _never_ come. It is a painful thought, that among the poorer patients, who from the ills of life suffer mental alienation; fathers depressed from loss or anxiety, mothers from exhaustion resulting from the rearing of a large family, the young man from vice, dissipation or disappointed hopes, and the foreigner among strangers, looking wistfully back to his native home—that these, all suffering from diseases which might possibly have been stayed, should be thrust into jails without attendants, simply put in irons if violent, and almost compelled through sheer inhumanity and neglect to suffer the misery of incurable lunacy!