My first impressions about the 'principal' were funny. As I have said, I did not realise where I was. I did not know that I was in an asylum; I did not understand what the curious people about me were; the only living soul I knew in the place was the servant of whom I have spoken, whose presence there was perhaps partially the reason for my failing to grasp the situation. I had of course no ground for supposing that he was out of his mind, or means for understanding why he should quarter himself in an asylum. He assured me, I think, that where I went he would go, out of personal devotion. But as he took the opportunity of enrolling himself among the asylum-warders, and treated me with a curious brutality, happily limited by inadequate physical means to carry out his views--I was myself so wasted that a child might have maltreated me, and only a brute would--I must have my doubts upon the matter. It was with a strange sense of relief that one morn I missed him from the accustomed haunts, and learned that he had departed for India in charge of the black gentleman, who was translated _ad eundem_ elsewhere, I suppose, as some of us occasionally were. It is a comfort to reflect that the black gentleman was of a vigorous build, and capable of resenting impertinence. I hope that he availed himself of his opportunity, as the man-monkey did, and employed personal arguments. The fancies of my bewildered brain chased each other like shadows. Sometimes I thought that this odious being was Judas Iscariot (his surname remotely resembled the word 'Judas'); sometimes--when he had told me how fond he was of me, and I was trying to dwell upon the pleasant fact--that he was a brother of mine who had died in infancy, and come back to love me in the absence of anybody else. Chance likenesses were enough to invest any of the weird faces round me with a name and identity of my own making; and when at night thick-coming dreams of the most vivid kind--through all of which, I am told, my sleep seemed as placid as a child's--invested phantoms with such reality that I was unable to separate mentally the visions of the night from those of the day, the confusion of brain through which I lived may be imagined. I have attempted to describe how, in their shocking lack of human characteristics, some of my companions assumed for me the semblance of animals. About my own identity I felt puzzled, and was a good deal occupied in arguing out with myself who I might be, from various insufficient data. The state is of course very common in delirium, and was in my case very natural. A short time before, I had been the possessor of home, family, name, and friends; and at the time when I needed all these most, I suddenly found myself an unregarded cipher, a worn-out garment cast aside, as unowned as 'Jo' at his crossing, and robbed of man's right of freedom without the mockery of a trial, when imprisonment was a form of cruelty which needs a new name.