that has been discovered in nature's own law of
kindness. Instead of being chained and treated as wild beasts, the
lunatics are treated as unfortunate men and women, and every effort is
made to ameliorate, both physically and morally, their sad condition.
Hence the bright wards, the buxom attendants, the frequent jinks. Even
the chapel-service has been brightened up for their behoof.

This was what I saw by entering as an amateur fiddler Herr Kuester's band
at Hanwell Asylum; and as I ran to catch the last up-train--which I did
as the saying is by the skin of my teeth--I felt that I was a wiser,
though it may be a sadder man, for my evening's experiences at the
Lunatic Ball.

One question would keep recurring to my mind. It has been said that if
you stop your ears in a ball-room, and then look at the people--reputed
sane--skipping about in the new valse or the last galop, you will
imagine they must be all lunatics. I did not stop my ears that night,
but I opened my eyes and saw hundreds of my fellow-creatures, all with
some strange delusions, many with ferocious and vicious propensities,
yet all kept in order by a few warders, a handful of girls, and all
behaving as decorously as in a real ball-room. And the question which
_would_ haunt me all the way home was, which are the sane people, and
which the lunatics?

CHAPTER VI.

A BABY SHOW.

There is no doubt that at the present moment the British baby is
assuming a position amongst us of unusual prominence and importance.
That he should be an institution is inevitable. That he grows upon us
Londoners at the rate of some steady five hundred a week, the
Registrar-General's statistics of the excess of births over deaths prove
beyond question. His domestic importance and powers of revolutionizing a
household are facts of which every Paterfamilias is made, from time to
time, unpleasantly aware. But the British baby is doing more than this
just at present. He is assuming a public position. Perhaps it is only
the faint index of the extension of women's rights to the infantile
condition of the sexes. Possibly our age is destined to hear of Baby
Suffrage, Baby's Property Protection, Baby's Rights and Wrongs in
general. It is beyond question that the British baby _is_ putting itself
forward, and demanding to be heard--as, in fact, it always had a habit
of doing. Its name has been unpleasantly mixed up with certain
revelations at Brixton, Camberwell, and Greenwich. Ba