There was a story the other day in an American newspaper of a lady who was spirited away by two scoundrels under the eyes of a whole party of travellers, not one of whom raised a finger to protect her when the fellows had whispered it about that she was 'mad.' This story may not have been true; but it was so singularly _ben trovato_ that it very well may have been; and the mere possibility of its truth argues the necessity of keeping our eyes well open to the dangers in which we live. I suppose that we most of us rather laughed at Charles Reade's attack upon private asylums, and quietly comforted ourselves with the reflection that 'in the nineteenth century' (an expression which is used as a sort of talisman, apparently, like the 'Briton' of Palmerston's day) such things are impossible. It requires a personal experience of their amenities, such as fell to my lot, seriously to believe that the adventures of a novel may be transferred to the pages of an 'article,' and be as strange--and true. Villainous conspiracies, for personal motives, to set the lunacy law in motion, are rare enough, I do not doubt. But the law favours them. What is not rare, I doubt even less, is the imprisonment in these fearful places of people who are perfectly sane, but suffering from some temporary disorder of the brain, the most delicate and intricate part of all the mechanism, and the least understood; and if asylums are a sad necessity for the really mad,--and even that I cannot help doubting; for from what I have seen I believe that they require a much more loving and more direct personal supervision than they can get, poor people,--for the nervous sufferers who are not mad they are terrible. The mad folk seemed to me happy enough on the whole, perhaps. But the suffering of those conscious of being sound of mind, but very sick in body, yet treated as sound of body and sick in mind--the life of the same among the mad, baffles description. They must be driven mad there by the score. I know what it is for men; what must it be for women? Personally, I do not believe I could have borne another week of it, for heart and brain were strained almost to bursting. What would have happened to me I do not know, for I had lost all care for anything. Nor did the kindly doctor, under whose advice I was saved, 'in spite of fortune,' ay, and in spite of myself, pretend to know either. But he believes that I must have broken down utterly, probably from softening of the brain.