ey love
and hate, and have a sense of humor. The worst are usually responsive
to kindness. In not a few cases their gratitude is livelier than that
of normal men and women. Any person who has worked among the insane,
and done his duty by them, can testify to cases in point; and even
casual observers have noted the fact that the insane are oftentimes
appreciative. Consider the experience of Thackeray, as related by
himself in "Vanity Fair" (Chapter LVII). "I recollect," he writes,
"seeing, years ago, at the prison for idiots and madmen, at Bicetre,
near Paris, a poor wretch bent down under the bondage of his
imprisonment and his personal infirmity, to whom one of our party gave
a halfpennyworth of snuff in a cornet or 'screw' of paper. The kindness
was too much ... He cried in an anguish of delight and gratitude; if
anybody gave you and me a thousand a year, or saved our lives, we could
not be so affected."

A striking exhibition of fine feeling on the part of a patient was
brought to my attention by an assistant physician whom I met while
visiting a State Hospital in Massachusetts. It seems that the woman in
question had, at her worst, caused an endless amount of annoyance by
indulging in mischievous acts which seemed to verge on malice. At that
time, therefore, no observer would have credited her with the exquisite
sensibility she so signally displayed when she had become convalescent
and was granted a parole which permitted her to walk at will about the
hospital grounds. After one of these walks, taken in the early spring,
she rushed up to my informant and, with childlike simplicity, told him
of the thrill of delight she had experienced in discovering the first
flower of the year in full bloom--a dandelion, which, with
characteristic audacity, had risked its life by braving the elements of
an uncertain season.

"Did you pick it?" asked the doctor.

"I stooped to do so," said the patient; "then I thought of the pleasure
the sight of it had given me--so I left it, hoping that someone else
would discover it and enjoy its beauty as I did."

Thus it was that a woman, while still insane, unconsciously exhibited
perhaps finer feeling than did Ruskin, Tennyson, and Patmore on an
occasion the occurrence of which is vouched for by Mr. Julian
Hawthorne. These three masters, out for a walk one chilly afternoon in
late autumn, discovered a belated violet bravely putting forth from the
shelter of a mossy stone. Not until these