caricatures, low and vulgar portraits of ourselves! 'What are you?' we scream, 'and why this orgy? Speak, caitiff, or for ever hold your peace!' [Illustration] "Perceiving that we are in earnest and not to be trifled with, and glare with forbidding mien, the caitiff speaks in trembling accents. 'If you please,' he says, 'I'm the artist from the great illustrated journal; I'm drawing pictures of the lunatics. My disguise is beyond my own control, and trips me up, but I'm told it's becoming.' 'Lunatics!' we echo. "'Yes,' the caitiff murmurs. 'This is the annual fancy dress ball at Brookwood Asylum. You and I and the doctors and attendants are the only sane people in the place. By-and-by the country gentry will be admitted, and then the tangle will be hopeless, for even in everyday life it's impossible to know who's mad and who isn't. How much more here?' "We left the trembling caitiff to his secret sketching, and the despondency produced by his appearance. He was sane, was he? Then in him were we revenged on human nature, for sure never was mortal more oppressed by his gear and his surroundings." The fact is that my editor, in sending his "young man," omitted to say that the invitation was crossed with "fancy dress only," so I arrived in ordinary war-paint. The Doctor was horrified. "This will never do. My patients will resent it. You _must_ be in fancy dress." All my host could find was a seedy red curtain and an old cocked hat (had it been a nightcap I should have been complete as Caudle). I wrapped this martial cloak around me, and soon found myself in the most extraordinary scene, so graphically described by Wingfield. He was not alone in his scorn for me. The "Duke of York" had a great contempt for my appearance, but when introduced to him as His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, he unbent, waved his bauble, and commanded me to be seated. The visitors eyed me suspiciously all the evening, and on my entering the supper-room, accompanied by the Doctor, they were seized with the idea that I must be a very dangerous case, and readily made room--in fact, made off. One of the poor patients was an artist, and showed me his sketch-book, the work of many, many months--a number of drawings in colour, stuck one on top of the other, resembling an elongated concertina, so that only the corners of the pages could be seen. The patients wore costumes designed and made by themselves, in marked contrast to their stylish keepers. Among the guests the county families were well represented, and garrison officers from a neighbouring depot formed a motley group which a looker-on, viewing the scene as in a kaleidoscope, would laugh at. One turn, and the next moment some incident might occur which an imaginative brain could easily work into a romance too touching to relate.