The Commissioners I saw once during my second confinement. They came down, like a wolf on the fold, unexpected. Their approach is, I believe, always concealed from the patients, for fear of upsetting their minds. They came with return-tickets from town, good for one day. They made a sudden incursion into my room--two or three, I forget which, but one was a short lame gentleman who asked questions: Was I comfortable? Had I headaches?--(well, I had that day, from the paint)--and did I hear voices? My chair-covers were being removed at the time, and I had no space to think, much less speak. Twice in the day afterwards I begged of the warders to be allowed to see them again, but neither them nor doctor of course did I see. I say that I was never mad; and there is not an honest reader of this story who will not believe me. And that is all I saw of her Majesty's Commissioners in Lunacy. Was I wrong in calling this a farce? I have nothing to suggest to them. Where work is ill done, criticism may do good. Where it is not done at all, criticism is silent. '_Où il n'y a rien, le roi perd ses droits._' I wrote afterwards, when I was free, to one of them, who had been once a friend of my own, as I thought it my duty to write. He was then _functus officio_ certainly, and well out of it. But he never answered my letter; which I have no doubt he put complacently by, as a madman's nonsense. It must be a comfortable berth enough where officers and doctors and lawyers and relatives are all in a tale, and, in the world below here, there are few to find you out.