This idea of 'voices' was in my case a suggestion of the doctor's, thrown out innocently enough, perhaps, in the first instance; but it did me in my illness fearful harm. It may be felt by all who know how much, at the best of times, some old tune or scrap of odd verse will haunt and worry us, with what tenacity this fancy, once implanted, would take root and bud in a brain always active and imaginative, and then wearied and overworn by long weakness, and incapable of the brave effort by which alone such contemptible nonsense could be shaken off, amid its grotesque and terrible surroundings. Harried and bothered about fits, voices, delusions, white matters and gray; ill beyond belief, and longing for nothing but good food and rest, but 'watched' night and day; speculating what and who all these people might be; irritated by the doctors and insulted by the attendants--vigorously kicked by one of them one morning, I remember, when my hands were too weak to do their office, and I did not dress myself quick enough to please him--that I should be here now, sound and strong, I may well attribute to some Power above the selfishness of men, which will not suffer these infamies to go too far. After the usual fashion in such cases, the doctor of that place may now claim credit for my 'cure.' I will show, before I have done, how he cut himself off, by his own deliberate statement, from the possibility of claiming it. Over these 'voices' of his I brooded and brooded till they assumed some thing very like reality. I thought in my wretchedness of some dead and gone who would have shielded me from this with their lives, till their unforgotten 'voices' became at last a very part and parcel of my individual being, if a certified madman may presume to claim it. They comforted and yet they haunted me, till at last I can almost believe that they became to me guardian angels, like the 'voices' of Joan of Arc. Small chance would she have stood in the hands of British specialists. England might have punished her worse than by fagots if she had handed her over to them. For me, had I to choose again between the most painful death and another term of imprisonment in the asylum best beloved of the Commissioners, I should scarcely hesitate a moment in my selection of the first. These 'voices' of the doctor's creation were to be cast in my teeth again and again. One of the three questions vouchsafed me by a Commissioner, during the whole period, related to them; and when I say again what I said in my first chapter, that they are the worst piece of humbug of all, I believe that I speak the truth, which is difficult where all is humbug. I have his leave to quote here the words of a friend's letter written about this history of mine. He spent one night at this same asylum, upon a visit there to a 'patient': 'Well may you say there is but one thing that can enable a man to bear such a trial. I often wonder how I got through that night, and how it was