The warders' faces met mine in the morning; and in a wild opium-trance, acting on the brain at its weakest, I was removed to my prison again. Once during the journey, I learn, I spoke, and once only, when the sight of my colonial indulging in a pot of beer woke the healthy British nature to solicit a drink I do not remember it; for I remember nothing but a confused succession of trains and platforms, till I woke to semi-consciousness in the asylum--to find myself lying on the ground on my back, with a doctor on one side and my old servant--returned from India in the interval--upon the other, contemplating me. This was described as a 'fit'--vaguely. I must have been, like the Yankee of the story, 'a whale at fits,' for I had them of all kinds--epileptic; epileptoid--'toid' meaning nothing, but being substituted when the first 'diagnosis' revealed itself in its native silliness; paralytic (in the left arm, when I had lain on it in bed for some days and rather numbed it); and any others that came handy. I wish I could see those 'notes;' they must be wonderful. But as in the multitude of counsellors is wisdom, in the multitude of maladies is safety. So began my second term--of eight months' imprisonment. Was ever such a story told? There shall be but very little more of it. VII. As I look back at the first chapter of this story of mine, and see that I wrote down that my experience had nothing in it especially painful, I wonder at the aptitude of human nature to forget and forgive, where it is only permitted. Now that I have brought my mind to bear upon the details, they seem to me fraught with a quite exceptional pain. It needed time and thought for me to measure, in anything like its depth and height, the wrong that was done to me. Oblivion alone shall remain when this my closing chapter is finished; for forgiveness has in my case been made impossible, since. Si l'effort est trop grand pour la faiblesse humaine De pardonner les maux qui nous viennent d'autrui, Épargne-toi du moins le tourment de la haine: À défaut du pardon, laisse venir l'oubli! When I was first imprisoned among madmen, after the piece of childish folly which had in it no object, if it had any at all, but to make those come and nurse me whose clear duty it was to do so, I was so ill and broken that, had he been in my case, Mine enemy's dog, Though he had bit me, should have stood that night Against my fire. The second time it was perhaps more cruel still. And the thing was done under cover of the lunacy-laws. If they protect mere heartlessness so, what must they do in cases where purposes directly evil are to be served?