e.
But when I bid them bring her.
They answer, 'By and by.'
Just turn the key, please, won't you,
And let me slip out sly?"

One of the most troublesome patients at the Virginia Asylum for the
Insane in Staunton was a pretty, pale little woman named Mrs. Chase.

To look at her sitting very quiet--sometimes with her fair little hands
meekly folded, and a brooding sorrow in her tearful, deep blue eyes--you
would have said she was a most interesting patient, and could not surely
give any one trouble.

But the women attendants in her ward could have told you quite a
different story.

Mrs. Chase had a suicidal mania, and had to be watched closely all the
time to keep her from taking her own life.

These attendants would have explained to you that all insane people have
some hobby that they ride industriously all the time.

There was the man who believed himself to be Napoleon reincarnated, and
amused everybody with his military toggery and braggadocio.

There was the lady who called herself Queen Victoria, and was never seen
without a huge pasteboard crown.

There were the two men who each claimed to be the Christ, and frowned
disapproval on the claims of each other.

There was the youth who imagined himself a violin virtuoso, and fiddled
all day long, varying his performance by pausing to pass around the hat
for pennies, of which he had accumulated, it was said, more than a
gallon already.

There was the forsaken bride who was waiting every day for the false
lover to return and bear her away on a blissful wedding-tour.

There was the man who believed himself already dead, and solemnly
recounted to you the particulars of the horrible death he had died,
adding that he was detained from his grave by the delay of the cruel
undertakers in taking his measure for the coffin. He had actually been
known to slip into the dead-house one day, and lie down in a casket
intended for a real corpse, having to have force employed to eject him
from his narrow abode.

Again, there was the man who imagined himself to be a grain of corn, and
fled with screams of alarm from the approach of a chicken. These, and
scores of others with hobbies, tragic or ridiculous, as the case might
be; but not one of them all, said the attendants, needed such care and
watching as pale, pretty, meek little Mrs. Chase.

Her hobby was a lost or stolen child.

No one knew whether or not there was any truth in her claim. She had