kitchen chair. He
was to be alone then!... He thanked God for this solitude and slept.

He awoke at six o'clock to the clipped shriek of a whistle. Shortly
after, a key turned in his door. There followed the sound of scores of
bare feet pattering up and down the hall. Was it imagination or did
these muffled footfalls have an inhuman softness?... Suddenly his door
flew open. He shrank beneath the bedclothes, peering out with one
unscreened eye.

A knot of gesticulating and innocent madmen were gazing at him with
all the simplicity of children. After a few moments, their curiosity
satisfied, they pattered on their ghostly way again.

This, he afterward learned, was the daily morning inspection of
newcomers.

Presently the whistle blew again and a bell sounded through the
corridors. A rush of answering feet swept past; a great silence fell.

A half hour later a monstrous man with glittering eyes and clawlike
fingers came in, carrying breakfast--a large dishpan filled with a
slimy mush, two slices of dry bread, and a mound of greasy hash. Fred
turned away with a movement of supreme disgust. The gigantic attendant
laughed.

There came a call of, "All outside!" echoing through the halls; a rush
of feet again, a hushed succeeding silence. The half-mad ogre went to
the window and slyly beckoned Fred to follow. He crawled out of bed
and took his place before the iron bars. The man pointed a skinny
finger; Fred's gaze followed. He found himself looking down upon a
stone-paved yard filled with loathsome human wreckage--gibbering
cripples, drooling monsters, vacant-eyed corpses with only the motions
of life. Some had their hands strapped to their sides, others were
almost naked. They sang, shouted, and laughed, prayed or were silent,
according to their mental infirmities. It was an inferno all the more
horrible because of its reality, a relentless nightmare from which
there was no awakening.

Fred heard the man at his side chuckling ferociously.

His tormentor was laughing with insane cruelty. "The bull pen! Ha, ha,
ha!"

Fred made his way back to his bed. Midway he stopped.

"Does everybody ..." he began to stammer--"does everybody ... or only
those who ..."

He broke off in despair. What could this mad giant tell him? But
almost before the thought had escaped him his companion read his
thought with uncanny precision.

"You think I don't know!" the man said, tapping his head
significantly. "But everybody ... they