enough generally managing to collar a bit of pudding as they march out. This is very short work, you say, but it is quite long enough. You will hear a woman screaming now and then, short as it is, and an attempt will be sure to be made to get over to the men’s side before the meal is over. You see enough to sadden you, but the worst cases you do not see—they are wisely concealed from the curious eye; it is enough to know that they are humanely tended. Why should we care to look on such? Going down a stair-case, I saw through a glass door a poor creature suffering from suicidal monomania; night and day she had to be watched, and such had been the case for years. In her sad face there was visible to the most superficial observer “The settled gloom The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore.” Well might she wish to lay down her life, that her crazed brain had rendered insupportable. It is a sad sight that of an assembly of insane men and women. At the asylum to which I refer they are very humane people, and very successful in their treatment of the distressing cases constantly occurring, and twice a year—at Christmas and Midsummer—they give an entertainment, at which the better-behaved lunatics attend, and seemingly enjoy themselves very much. I was recently at one, and when I arrived, found that a field adjoining the asylum had been set apart for the purpose. There were about five hundred lunatics, male and female, present, and besides there were several gentlemen and ladies present, spectators like myself. It was a lovely afternoon, and there was music and dancing, and playing cricket, and battledore and shuttlecock, and all the various enjoyments of out-door life; but in all these matters I found the attendants appeared to take the initiative; still the poor creatures seemed to enjoy themselves much, and were happy in their way. Yet the pleasure-seeker will not go to such a spectacle again. I do not say the vulgar idea of the maniac was realized; on the contrary, the poor creatures seemed decent and very well behaved—but there was a pitiable want of fine physical development, there were in abundance crooked forms and stunted figures. You do not like to see what a poor thing is man when his reason is dethroned. Of course the refractory patients we do not see on such occasions, but, looking up at a window, I saw one woman’s face—as she viewed the scene in which she might not participate—so wild in its anger and hopeless in its despair, that that face haunts me yet. It set me thinking how a woman could get into that state. Perhaps her father and mother, ignorant of physiological laws, had married, and she had been the result; or the ignorance of her friends, or her own ignorance—or the competition of modern life—or the wrongdoing of others—had precipitated a catastrophe which otherwise might never have occurred, and thus society pays indirectly for its ignorance far more than it would have to do for a