My first acquaintance with the warder whom I regarded--I do not very well know why--as a sort of master-gaoler among his fellows, was made upon my road to the asylum. I was escorted to London from the forest by my adhesive body-servant, and by the young doctor whose charge I was leaving, who had formally certified my insanity. As I have said, he told me when we parted that he held the step taken to be wrong, and wished it to be avoided. I was ill, he thought, and needed care. I fail to see, under these circumstances, how he was justified in signing the certificate. He was young, unskilled, a stranger to me but a week or two before, and I had lived with his wife and family. Whether any pressure was put upon him I do not know, and had rather not enquire. It is enough for my purpose quietly to state that I am to this hour in the dark as to the details of the business, and that I was consigned to a madhouse, against his will, on the order of a doctor who did not believe me mad. Three authorities on lunacy had stated but a short time before that I was in no danger of being so. Nor was I--till the madhouse made the danger. Such is the law. He escorted me to London, and we parted there. At the terminus the confidential warder met us from the asylum, and took his place. The last I saw of him was that, as he ran fast along the platform, he 'washed his hands with invisible soap,' expressively, as of me and my concerns. He guessed something of what he had done, I suppose, though I hope not all; and thought that I was going forth into the outer darkness for evermore. My companions were well fitted to conduct me there. The forbidding personality of my special servant is still at times a presence in my thoughts; and the other afterwards was to haunt me still more. He was a rough, red-bearded, well-looking fellow enough--an old colonial squatter--and, as I remember him, very sufficiently good-natured and good-hearted. He was very fond of beer, and great at collecting shilling novels from all quarters. When in the latter days of my imprisonment he was told off to keep a special watch over me, I grew to shrink from and to dread him, in my very weakness, like a whipped child. He was kindly, but too big, and I was afraid of him. How many fears of the same sort must harass and perplex all those darkened lives is another of the sealed mysteries of the English Bastilles. I associated him so closely with my first coming; I remembered with a vision at once so dim and clear how he had curiously examined me from the opposite seat of the carriage as the train sped on in the darkening winter evening, through what country I knew not, to what destination I had no care to ask. When the doctor whom I had left had hinted where I was to go, I had failed to understand him. Had he told me in more direct words, I could not have believed in such a thing being done; I could not have believed in its possibility, as on looking back it baffles my understanding now.