Collinson pointed to the window. “It’s that monkey on the string,” he said. “Something about it struck me as mighty funny!” So, with a better spirit, he turned away, still laughing, and went home to face his wife. JEANNETTE THE nurses at the sanitarium were all fond of the gentlest patient in the place, and they spoke of him as “Uncle Charlie,” though he was so sweetly dignified that usually they addressed him as “Mr. Blake,” even when it was necessary to humour his delusion. The delusion was peculiar and of apparently interminable persistence; he had but the one during his sixteen years of incarceration—yet it was a misfortune painful only to himself (painful through the excessive embarrassment it cost him) and was never for an instant of the slightest distress to any one else, except as a stimulant of sympathy. For all that, it closed him in, shutting out the moving world from him as completely as if he had been walled up in concrete. Moreover, he had been walled up overnight—one day he was a sane man, and the next he was in custody as a lunatic; yet nothing had happened in this little interval, or during any preceding interval in his life, to account for a seizure so instantaneous. In 1904 no more commonplace young man could have been found in any of the great towns of our Eastern and near-Eastern levels. “Well brought up,” as we used to say, he had inherited the quiet manner, the good health, and the moderate wealth of his parents; and not engaging in any business or profession, he put forth the best that was in him when he planned a lunch for a pretty “visiting girl,” or, again, when he bought a pair of iron candle-snuffers for what he thought of as his “collection.” This “collection,” consisting of cheerless utensils and primitive furniture once used by woodsmen and farmers, and naturally discarded by their descendants, gave him his principal occupation, though he was sometimes called upon to lead a cotillion, being favourably regarded in the waltz and two-step; but he had no eccentricities, no habitual vices, and was never known to exhibit anything in the nature of an imagination.