There is a London doctor who has a home of this sort. If you were conducted over it, and saw its inmates, you would think that he must have nerves of iron to pass his life in such weird companionship. Young, middle-aged, and old, the patients are every one of them so marred by nature that ordinary life among their fellow-creatures is impossible. Once in my life, trespassing in a private wood in search of primroses, I came suddenly upon a group of human beings so strange in their appearance, so awful, that for a moment I believed that I was the victim of an hallucination. It was only when a gentleman came hurriedly up to me, demanding to know what I wanted, and I had explained that I had only trespassed in search of wild flowers, that I learnt the wood formed part of the grounds of a private asylum in which the "afflicted" members of wealthy families were received. I understood then what the terrible scene I had witnessed meant, and I hastened to apologize for my unintentional intrusion. But a mother's love is not for beauty of form or soundness of mind, and so it frequently happens that the suffering one is dearer to her than all, and is never allowed to be taken from her fostering care. Still, she cannot expect that it will be looked on by strangers--not always by its own kith and kin--with the eyes of love through which she sees it, and so there is a portion of the dwelling-place set apart--a room, or rooms, where no one but herself and one trusted attendant ever enters. There the sufferer lives, cut off from the world--a prisoner, in a sense--and passes from childhood to youth, sometimes from youth to middle-age, its very existence unknown to the friends who from time to time visit the house and join the family circle. Because the secret is so carefully guarded, this phase of our poor humanity is unfamiliar to us. Its existence is hardly suspected. But it is the lifelong sorrow in many a home that the world thinks a happy one. When the sorrow is that of a noble family, and the afflicted one is the heir to a proud name and a vast estate, we hear of it. The secret cannot in such circumstances always be guarded. A whisper of it is certain to get about. But with those less conspicuously before the world the secret may be kept until the grave hides it for ever. Into the more painful--I will not say repulsive--phase of this subject I do not desire to enter; it is right that that which shocks and horrifies should be kept from the public gaze. But on certain phases which are sad and pathetic, without being repulsive, it may be permissible to dwell for a moment.