the
place, and asked to be allowed to look round. The weak-eyed girl watched
him. He found that all the women with children, twenty persons in all,
were obliged to sleep in one room, which, owing to the hill-slope, was
partly under ground, and which had but half a window for light, and no
ventilation, except the chance draft from the door. Jones had declared
that the women with children must stay there--"he warn't goin' to have
brats a-runnin' over the whole house." Here were vicious women and good
women, with their children, crowded like chickens in a coop for market.
And there were, as usual in such places, helpless, idiotic women with
illegitimate children. Of course this room was the scene of perpetual
quarreling and occasional fighting.

In the quarters devoted to the insane, people slightly demented and
raving maniacs were in the same rooms, while there were also those utter
wrecks which sat in heaps on the floor, mumbling and muttering
unintelligible words, the whole current of their thoughts hopelessly
muddled, turning around upon itself in eddies never ending.

"That air woman," said the weak-eyed girl, "used to holler a heap when
she was brought in here. But Pap knows how to subjue 'em. He slapped her
in the mouth every time she hollered. She don't make no furss now, but
jist sets down that way all day, and keeps a-whisperin'."

Ralph understood it. When she came in she was the victim of mania; but
she had been beaten into hopeless idiocy. Indeed this state of incurable
imbecility seemed the end toward which all traveled. Shut in these bare
rooms, with no treatment, no exercise, no variety, and meager food,
cases of slight derangement soon grew into chronic lunacy.

One young woman, called Phil, a sweet-faced person, apparently a
farmer's wife, came up to Ralph and looked at him kindly, playing with
the buttons on his coat in a childlike simplicity. Her blue-drilling
dress was sewed all over with patches of white, representing ornamental
buttons. The womanly instinct toward adornment had in her taken this
childish turn.

"Don't you think they ought to let me go home?" she said with a
sweetness and a wistful, longing, home-sick look, that touched Ralph to
the heart. He looked at her, and then at the muttering crones, and he
could see no hope of any better fate for her. She followed him round the
barn-like rooms, returning every now and then to her question. "Don't
you think I might go home now?"

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