All this bears so fair an outside that it seems difficult to quarrel with it. Yet the life that it concealed was inconceivably terrible. My head was full of the weakest, the most varying, the most wandering fancies--the fancies of sheer and long-continued exhaustion. These parties, games, entertainments, meals, without a friend's face near me, without hope, wish, or volition; with the shouts and cries of the really violent to wake me sometimes at night; with every form of personal affliction to haunt and mock and yet companion me by day; with poor fellows playing all sorts of strange antics round me, herded together anyhow or nohow, with or without private rooms of their own--more, I am afraid, in proportion as their friends could or would pay for them or not, on the footing of 'first-class patients' than on any other intelligible principle; with Death in the house every now and then, falling suddenly and terribly on one of these unhappy outcasts from some unsuspected malady within, which they could not explain, spoken of in whispers, and hushed up and forgotten as soon as might be; with the warders--'attendants,' if you like it better--playing their rough horse-play all over the great house, the Philistines making sport of the poor helpless Samsons, and varying their amusements by coarse and gross language which made the chilled blood run colder;--the story makes me shrink in the telling, and almost regret that I have undertaken to tell it. But the evil wants cautery to the very core, and I believe that every story of the kind should be told. To me personally death was very near indeed in that house more than once, from the most complete and absolute exhaustion of brain. I felt it at the time as I have known it since. Death in utter solitude, save for the warders by my side, whose duty it was--or they interpreted it as such, some of them--to hold me down and jump upon me, or kneel on my breastbone, if I turned round or uttered any wandering words in bed. When I was really dying, happily, I was too weak for movement or for word. And there is no stranger comment on the strange nature of the great and common mystery than the fact that in those supreme moments, unconscious of all else, I felt consciously and intensely happy--happier than I have ever felt, perhaps, in all my life. But I had to live, and I did. And so sound was the brain in all its weakness that I have hardly forgotten a single detail of my life in that place, scarcely even any of the vague and wandering fancies that possessed the starved head; so vague and wandering that, had I told one-fourth of them to the doctor, to whom I told (on the principle of Mr. Sala's friends) far too many, all Bedlam itself had not been held more mad than I. What I call fancies they call 'delusions.' And as such I believe that they are written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Commissioners of Lunacy. For we know with what parental care these shameful things are done.