worthies had got down on all
fours and done ceremonious homage to the flower did they resume their
walk. Suddenly Ruskin halted and, planting his cane in the ground,
exclaimed, "I don't believe, Alfred--Coventry, I don't believe that
there are in all England three men besides ourselves who, after finding
a violet at this time of year, would have had forbearance and fine
feeling enough to refrain from plucking it."

The reader may judge whether the unconscious display of feeling by the
obscure inmate of a hospital for the insane was not finer than the
self-conscious raptures of these three men of world-wide reputation.

Is it not, then, an atrocious anomaly that the treatment often meted
out to insane persons is the very treatment which would deprive some
sane persons of their reason? Miners and shepherds who penetrate the
mountain fastnesses sometimes become mentally unbalanced as a result of
prolonged loneliness. But they usually know enough to return to
civilization when they find themselves beginning to be affected with
hallucinations. Delay means death. Contact with sane people, if not too
long postponed, means an almost immediate restoration to normality.
This is an illuminating fact. Inasmuch as patients cannot usually be
set free to absorb, as it were, sanity in the community, it is the duty
of those entrusted with their care to treat them with the utmost
tenderness and consideration.

"After all," said a psychiatrist who had devoted a long life to work
among the insane, both as an assistant physician and later as
superintendent at various private and public hospitals, "what the
insane most need is a _friend_!"

These words, spoken to me, came with a certain startling freshness. And
yet it was the sublime and healing power of this same love which
received its most signal demonstration two thousand years ago at the
hands of one who restored to reason and his home that man of Scripture
"who had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no,
not with chains: Because that he had been often bound with fetters and
chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters
broken in pieces; neither could any man tame him. And always, night and
day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting
himself with stones. But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and
worshipped him, And cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to
do with Thee, Jesus, Thou Son of the Most High