As the time of retirement on this floor is just half-past eight in the evening, there is considerable time during the long nights of winter for some kind of exercise between dark and bed-time. So after the hall is lighted up, the patients betake themselves to such kinds of recreation as suits them best—some to reading, some to walking the hall in pairs, which is a good exercise, others engage in the different games practiced on the hall, while some will always sit looking blank, as though all the world besides them were asleep or dead. There is a state of mind in that institution which I have thought would not be moved if the house were on fire. I once saw it demonstrated on the fourth hall. A young man was brought on to that hall by his friends from the city of Utica, subject to epileptic fits; these fits had injured his mind very much; yet he was as harmless as a child, and a greater mistake never happened than to take a child to the lunatic asylum who has fits, thinking they can be benefited by it; but if it is done to get the child out of their sight, and to throw the care of them on to other hands, why then, that alters the case; but if that were my object, I certainly should not send them there; I would sooner send them to the county poor-house. But to return to my story. He was sitting at the table; I think it was breakfast; we had all commenced eating; in a moment he fell backward chair and all, with a terrible groan, foaming at the mouth, and uttering most horrible groans; I started up as by instinct; my knife and fork dropped from my hands, and I was about to take hold of him to take him up, when two attendants took him up and carried him to his room. But I observed that more than half of those at the table never looked up nor stopped eating. I made up my mind that if they had been asked after breakfast, what happened at the breakfast table this morning, the would have said, “nothing that they knew of.” That was the state of mind I wanted to be in when I entered the asylum; then I should have had no trouble by anything I saw or heard. I do not wish the reader to understand that I _now_ wish that to have been my state of mind.