ent to those that are
within it?'

'After having spoken so much against tyranny,' said Miss Mancel,
smiling, 'I do not know whether I should be excusable if I left you to
be tyrannized by curiosity, which I believe can inflict very severe
pains, at least, if I may be allowed to judge by the means people often
take to satisfy it. I will therefore gratify you with the knowledge of
what is within this inclosure, which makes so extraordinary an
impression upon you. It is, then, an asylum for those poor creatures who
are rendered miserable from some natural deficiency or redundancy. Here
they find refuge from the tyranny of those wretches, who seem to think
that being two or three feet taller gives them a right to make them a
property, and expose their unhappy forms to the contemptuous curiosity
of the unthinking multitude. Procrustes has been branded through all
ages with the name of tyrant; and principally, as it appears, from
fitting the body of every stranger to a bed which he kept as the
necessary standard, cutting off the legs of those whose height exceeded
the length of it and stretching on the rack such as fell short of that
measure, till they attained the requisite proportion. But is not almost
every man a Procrustes? We have not the power of shewing our cruelty
exactly in the same method, but actuated by the like spirit, we abridge
of their liberty, and torment by scorn, all who either fall short, or
exceed the usual standard, if they happen to have the additional
misfortune of poverty. Perhaps we are in no part more susceptible than
in our vanity, how much then must those poor wretches suffer, whose
deformity would lead them to wish to be secluded from human view, in
being exposed to the public, whose observations are no better than
expressions of scorn, and who are surprised to find that any thing less
than themselves can speak, or appear like intelligent beings. But this
is only part of what they have to endure. As if their deficiency in
height deprived them of the natural right to air and sunshine, they are
kept confined in small rooms, and because they fill less space than
common, are stuffed into chairs so little, that they are squeezed as
close as a pair of gloves in a walnut-shell.

'This miserable treatment of persons, to whom compassion should secure
more than common indulgence, determined us to purchase these worst sort
of slaves, and in this place we have five who owed their wretchedness to
being only