So completely was I forgotten, that when at last I came to life again, it was to find a three years' arrear of unopened letters piled up in my old chambers, for which no one during my illness had even taken the trouble to inquire. They read to me then like messages from another world. Some favourite pictures and my writer's chair--the unambitious 'Law library' which I had once owned, and a set of handsome and valued Harrow prizes, had vanished altogether, and 'nobody' was to blame. It was the doing of a company, I suppose; but I had clearly no business to reappear upon the scene. I did not like it, though. Knowing myself in keep and hold, and not knowing why, it was natural that I should invest the asylum with the attributes of a gaol. I have said that I expected to be handcuffed in the train; and when on the first evening a fierce-looking man rushed at me with a dark-blue ribbon, asked me what I meant by not wearing one, and declared, with a sense of personal offence, that I was 'not the least like my uncle,' I took him for the master-gaoler, and mentally christened him, 'Rocco,' in the odd dramatic vein which would run through my thoughts. This blue ribbon, worn in honour of the University boat-race, and the fact that one of my first memories is that I found a hot-cross bun placed by my bedside for breakfast, in sympathetic honour of One who died to teach us love and mercy, are the two things which enable me to fix with accuracy the date of my imprisonment as about the Easter-tide, now nearly four years ago. The terrible probation that followed seems to me now to have cut my life into two parts, as completely as I am conscious to myself of its having changed my whole character, and stamped and remoulded it in a new and other cast. Such furnace-fires as these must do so. They make the common trials of our race seem ludicrously small, and I find myself looking with a certain quaint wonder at people who talk to me of their hard experiences of life. With what a sense of gratitude I find myself unembittered--however justly and strongly resentful, where other feelings would be out of place--regarding my fellow-creatures from the pleasantest point of view, and the world generally in the light of the laughing philosopher, I cannot say. Trials are like pills. The taste depends upon how you take them.