Certainly no institution of its type ever had such cheerful inmates as the Glenrose Sanatorium could boast so long as Colonel Kenwynton and the blind Major sojourned within its gates, the guests of the alienist and Captain Hugh Treherne. The patient experienced no recurrence of his malady during the visit. Indeed, the beneficial influence, with the incident change of thought, conversation, and occupation, was so obvious that the physician acceded to Colonel Kenwynton’s earnest urgency to allow the Captain to go home with him and spend a few weeks at his plantation, in a neighboring county. They made a solemn compact for the conservation of his safety and the promotion of his mental health. “Captain,” said the Colonel the first evening that they spent together over the wood fire in the old plantation house, “I don’t know what is the particular devil that you say possesses you at times, and I don’t want to know. He is an indignity to you and an affront to me. Never mention the nature of the obsession to me for I won’t hear it. Never let me have so much as a glimpse of his horn or his hoof. But if you, unhappily, ever feel again the clutch of his claw fastening on you, just report to me, and we’ll both strike out in a dog-trot for that insane asylum, and let the doctor exorcise him a bit. And I swear to you before God on our sacred bonds as comrades in the Lost Cause I will stay there with you till you are ready to come home with me. Shake hands on it, dear old fellow--shake hands on it.” Perhaps because the topic was interdicted in conversation it was the less intrusive in thought. Hugh Treherne maintained an observance of the Colonel’s mandate as strict and as soldierly as if it had been read in general orders at the head of the regiment. He found an interest in the Colonel’s affairs in the ramshackle old place, which was but a meager remnant of his former princely domain. Colonel Kenwynton had brought down from the larger methods of the old times a constitutional disregard of minutæ. Hence men, “indifferent honest,” otherwise would overreach him in negotiation. Servants filched ruthlessly his minor possessions. His pastures, fields, barns, orchards, were plundered with scarcely a realization of the significance of robbery, the facile phrase, “The old Cunnel won’t care,” or “The old Cunnel won’t ever know the difference,” sufficient to numb any faint prick of conscience.