I have been very frank with my readers about the strange fancies which took possession of my brain. No one of them who has known what it is to lie sick of a fever, or has ever seen others lying so, will be surprised to read of them. But in a lunatic asylum these common signs of a common illness are called 'delusions.' I was talking once, during my interval of freedom, over the position in which I was placed, with one of the three doctors who had vouched for my soundness of mind, who has justly won for himself a great name among those who have in worthy earnest studied the diseases of the brain, as far as it is given to man to study them. He spoke to me of private asylums with shrinking and with dread; and in my hypochondriac days had warned me as a friend of the dangers that might await me. 'Travel,' he said; 'do anything rather than give way. If once you find yourself in an asylum, Heaven help you!' And when I spoke to him later of the things that had been said of me, 'I know that word "delusions" too well,' said he, 'and the use that is made of it.' I did not, then. But when, after my final deliverance, I found myself accused by those who should have helped and shielded me in every way of being 'under delusions' as to their conduct towards me, I learned to know. I discovered this indirectly through others, and would not at first believe it. But it is true, like the rest of the story, and like the rest of the story is so set down. They say it everywhere, and they may be saying so still, and I have long known that they did not scruple to say it. There let that part of my subject end; for I sincerely trust that it lies outside of human experience. But it is a possible consequence, remember, of this abuse of law. In the general state of confusion which, launched as I was into this very novel state of existence, took possession of my faculties, and seemed almost to supply a meaning and coherence to the old rhyme, Supposing I was you, And supposing you was me, And supposing we all were somebody else, I wonder who we'd be! the _raison d'être_ of the old physician puzzled me exceedingly. Sometimes I took him for a superior being in charge of the prison, sometimes for a divine, sometimes for the Evil One, and sometimes for a butler. When labouring under the last impression, I resented some question he thought it his duty to ask me, and his attempt to bar my peaceful passage from one room to another. I am afraid that I took him by the collar and put him against the wall--perhaps, under the circumstances, a pardonable excess. The assault was not dangerous. There was nobody living at that moment, I think, who could not have knocked me down with his little finger. But from that time I was regarded, and entered in the books, as 'homicidal.' V.