s some distance away. It is now after the dinner
hour of the asylum, and as yet my patient sits in a corner brooding,
with a dull, sullen, woe-begone look in his face, which seems rather
to indicate than to show something directly. I cannot quite
understand it.

Later.--Another change in my patient. At five o'clock I looked in on
him, and found him seemingly as happy and contented as he used to be.
He was catching flies and eating them, and was keeping note of his
capture by making nailmarks on the edge of the door between the ridges
of padding. When he saw me, he came over and apologized for his bad
conduct, and asked me in a very humble, cringing way to be led back to
his own room, and to have his notebook again. I thought it well to
humour him, so he is back in his room with the window open. He has
the sugar of his tea spread out on the window sill, and is reaping
quite a harvest of flies. He is not now eating them, but putting them
into a box, as of old, and is already examining the corners of his
room to find a spider. I tried to get him to talk about the past few
days, for any clue to his thoughts would be of immense help to me, but
he would not rise. For a moment or two he looked very sad, and said
in a sort of far away voice, as though saying it rather to himself
than to me.

"All over! All over! He has deserted me. No hope for me now unless
I do it myself!" Then suddenly turning to me in a resolute way, he
said, "Doctor, won't you be very good to me and let me have a little
more sugar? I think it would be very good for me."

"And the flies?" I said.

"Yes! The flies like it, too, and I like the flies, therefore I like
it." And there are people who know so little as to think that madmen do
not argue. I procured him a double supply, and left him as happy a
man as, I suppose, any in the world. I wish I could fathom his mind.

Midnight.--Another change in him. I had been to see Miss Westenra,
whom I found much better, and had just returned, and was standing at
our own gate looking at the sunset, when once more I heard him
yelling. As his room is on this side of the house, I could hear it
better than in the morning. It was a shock to me to turn from the
wonderful smoky beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid lights
and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds
even as on foul water, and to realize all the grim sternness of my own
cold stone building, wit