some crouching under the garden shrubberies, some concealed even on the veranda of the house. After a long and weary wait, the house began to stir; shutters were taken down; a window, then a door, were thrown open; figures became visible moving inside from room to room; and presently someone came out on to the veranda. He was instantly seized and taken away. After several men and women had been arrested in this way, a general raid of the whole house took place. A dozen of the sheriff's men rushed in. The nurses, male and female, the "doctor"-proprietor, his assistants, and every single inmate, sane or crazy, were all caught and brought out under arrest, before they had tasted breakfast.
It was broad daylight by this time. The whole party, of at least thirty, were assembled in a barn where a magistrate, brought down specially for the purpose, held an impromptu court. If some of the inmates were insane at the time and had been so before incarceration, others certainly had been deliberately made insane by the harsh and cruel treatment to which they had purposely been subjected. There were painful episodes, while the testimony was hurriedly listened to in that improvised court of inquiry. Yet it has all, all vanished from my memory. I forget even what the sequel was, or what sentence the infamous proprietor received later on from a properly-constituted court. Many a sane man or woman had been rendered crazy by the treatment, I remember, and the quack had taken heavy payments from interested relatives for this purpose. But all details have vanished from my mind. What chiefly remains is the wonder of that breaking dawn, the light stealing over the sky, the sweet smell of the country and the tang of the salt sea. These, with the singing of the early birds, and the great yearnings they stirred in me, left deep impressions.
One reason, I am sure, why such painful and dramatic incidents have left so little trace, is that I had a way of shielding myself from the unpleasantness of them, so that their horror or nastiness, as the case might be, never
really got into me deeply. By a method of "detachment,"
