My time went on. During the bitter winter months the asylum was in the hands of workmen, under repair. The great echoing corridors were being papered and painted, the rooms renewed, the chapel decorated in the approved fashion. The workmen were at work by night as well as by day; and the patients slunk about the passages in greatcoats, and warmed themselves at casual fires. I thought that a better time might have been chosen, perhaps; and the confusion seemed to me worse confounded; but that is no affair of mine. 'Would God it were night!' I thought in the morning; and 'Would God it were morning!' at night--when the warders returned with a rush from their hour out, filled the passages with talk and noise and oaths, and with much ceremony brought bed-candles at ten. The plate was beautiful; and some of the candlesticks so big that I used sometimes to wonder whether my keeper for the nonce--they were told off to different rooms every night, to prevent us from growing too dependent upon anybody, I suppose--was going to precede me backwards to my bedroom. The common breakfast began at eight, and the common dinner was at one. There were two or three different mess tables for those who lived in common; and the rest ate apart, each in his own room. For a long time I used the last privilege; but I gathered at length a sort of desperate courage, and thought it better to face my kind as much as I could. Besides, at the common table there was, on the whole, enough to eat; while the private meals I found singularly Barmecidal and scraggy. I suppose that, like Oliver Twist, I might have asked for more. But I was afraid of everything and everybody, and, fearing a similar result, refrained. The faces at the board changed little; for ours was practically a place for incurables. Kindly Death changed them sometimes, as I have said. Some of those whom I remembered during my first period had changed visibly for the worse, like the poor singer of the beer-song, who seemed to me always struggling with a sense of wrong, which he could not speak. In the public asylums, I am told, cures are many. They were not so with us. There were times when patients were removed to some other asylum--for the worse, it may be; for I have said that Pecksniff Hall has the best of testimonials from the Commissioners; but, with the exception of the friend of whom I wrote, I remember no case of liberation but one. There was a clergyman confined among us, whose wife took lodgings in the village by. She was with him every day, watched him every day, walked with him every day, and never seemed to me to leave him till she took him away. Brave little woman, how I honoured her! for her nerve must have been tried enough. If these papers of mine make one relation think, as much as I can hope to do will have been done. The Master claimed much credit with me for this cure. May he deserve it! for he must need something to write upon the credit side.