tendants. "This man is a megalomaniac," he said: "he
believes that he is the Almighty."

"What is your treatment here?" Professor Swelding enquired. "I am aware
that the books prescribe isolation, but that is not sufficient by
itself."

"I nurse the brain by nursing the body," Dr. Biron replied. "I build up
my patient's system by careful attention to hygiene, diet, and rest, and
I pretend to ignore his mental alienation. There is always a spark of
sound sense in a diseased brain. This man imagines he is the Almighty,
but when he is hungry he has to ask for something to eat, and then we
pretend to wonder why he has any need to eat if he is the Almighty; he
has to concoct some explanation, and very gradually his reasoning power
is restored. A man ceases to be insane the moment he begins to
comprehend that he is insane."

The Professor followed the doctor, casting curious eyes at the various
patients who were walking in their gardens.

"Have you many cures?"

"That is a difficult question to answer," said Dr. Biron. "The
statistics are so very different in the different categories of
insanity."

"Of course," said Professor Swelding; "but take some particular type of
dementia, say, hallucination of persecution. What percentage of cures
can you show there?"

"Twenty per cent absolute recoveries, and forty per cent definite
improvements," the doctor replied promptly, and as the Professor evinced
unmistakable astonishment at so high a percentage, Dr. Biron took him
familiarly by the arm and drew him along. "I will show you a patient who
actually is to be sent home in a day or two. I believe that she is
completely cured, or on the very point of being completely cured."

A woman of about forty was sitting in one of the gardens by the side of
an attendant, quietly sewing. Dr. Biron paused to draw his visitor's
particular attention to her.

"That lady belongs to one of the best of our great merchant families.
She is Mme. Alice Rambert, wife of Etienne Rambert, the rubber merchant.
She has been under my care for nearly ten months. When she came here she
was in the last stage of debility and anaemia and suffered from the most
characteristic hallucination of all: she thought that assassins were all
round her. I have built up her physical system, and now I have cured her
mind. At the present moment that lady is not mad at all, in the proper
sense of the term."

"She never shows any symptoms of reverting to her morbid cond