But let me not laugh too much; for what followed was no laughing matter. I was 'attended' at my forest-doctor's by a servant, picked up I know not where, who considered it his duty to cheer me by suggesting cribbage, with dirty cards, and watching me, in my room, night and day, till his constant presence drove me nearly wild. Three of the leading 'mad-doctors' of London, to whom I was carried in 'consultation,' had pronounced me to be abundantly sane, though exhausted and helplessly hypochondriac, and bound to recover. So said my young doctor too. And when, one evening, after a foolish exhibition of desolate misery (and it _was_ misery), the moral responsibility whereof, if any attach to it, I am now quite content to lay at other doors than mine, a relative arrived, and, without any reference whatever to the skilled men of whom I have spoken, ordered my instant removal to 'another place,' the same young doctor-host told me that he would never have sanctioned such a step; but the relative had stayed but five minutes, left the order, and departed for foreign lands. I was therefore 'removed,' half-dying, in a state of semi-consciousness, I can scarcely remember how, to the castellated mansion mentioned in my first chapter. The wrong should have been impossible, of course; but it is possible, and it is law. My liberty, and my very existence as an individual being, had been signed away behind my back. In my weakened perceptions I at first thought that the mansion was an hotel. Left alone in a big room on the first evening, I was puzzled by the entrance of a wild-looking man, who described figures in the air with his hand, to an accompaniment of gibber, ate a pudding with his fingers at the other end of a long table, and retired. My nerve was shaken to its weakest, remember; and I was alone with him! It was not an hotel. It was a lunatic asylum. III.