ompromise--very faint, indeed, lest I should
disturb any patients who were being "psychopathized." While I waited I
had leisure to observe that hidden among the dahlias, and thatched over
as it were with a superannuated costermonger's barrow, was a double
perambulator, which set me calculating the probabilities of Mr. Ashman
being a family man.

The door was opened before I had settled the point to my own mental
satisfaction, by a short, cheery-looking man, with long, straight flaxen
hair flowing down over the shoulders of his black frock-coat, a beard a
few shades lighter, and a merry twinkling eye, which looked more
sympathetic than psychopathic, and I should think was calculated to do
patients good directly it lighted on them. He looked as much as to ask
whether I was psychopathically wrong, when I informed him that I had not
come as a patient, but simply to inspect his institution if he would
permit me. The permission was at once accorded. "We are hard at work,"
he said, as he ushered me into the front parlour; "but come in and see
what we are about."

A man who looked like a respectable artisan was sitting at the table;
and a second, in his shirt sleeves, was astride of a chair in what
appeared to be rather an idiotic ride-a-cock-horse-to-Banbury-Cross
fashion, and Mr. Ashman was pinching him and prodding him as butchers do
fat animals at the Smithfield Show.

"That there gentleman," said Mr. Ashman, in a broad provincial dialect,
"couldn't get astride that chair when he come here half-an-hour ago. How
d'ye feel now, sir?"

"Feel as though I should like to race somebody twenty rods for five
pound a-side," answered the patient, getting up and walking about the
room as if it were a new sensation. He had been brought, it appeared, to
Mr. Ashman by his friend, who was sitting at the table, and who was an
old psychopathic patient. He assured me he had suffered from rheumatism
for twenty years, and was completely disabled without his stick until he
came into that room half-an-hour since. He walked up and down stickless
and incessantly as the carnivora at the Zoo all the time he was telling
me.

"Would you mind putting your ear to this man's back, sir?" said Mr.
Ashman to me. I did so; and when he bent, his backbone seemed to go off
with a lot of little cracks like the fog-signals of a railway. "That
there old rusty hinge we mean to grease." And away he went
psychopathizing him again. When he was done, Mr. Ashman ex