It would have been difficult to find a more agreeable situation than
that of Healthful House. On the landward slope of a hill extended a
park of two hundred acres planted with the magnificent vegetation that
grows so luxuriantly in that part of North America, which is equal in
latitude to the Canary and Madeira Islands. At the furthermost limit
of the park lay the wide estuary of the Neuse, swept by the cool
breezes of Pamlico Sound and by the winds that blew from the ocean
beyond the narrow _lido_ of the coast.

Healthful House, where rich invalids were cared for under such
excellent hygienic conditions, was more generally reserved for the
treatment of chronic complaints; but the management did not decline to
admit patients affected by mental troubles, when the latter were not
of an incurable nature.

It thus happened--a circumstance that was bound to attract a good deal
of attention to Healthful House, and which perhaps was the motive
for the visit of the Count d'Artigas--that a person of world-wide
notoriety had for eighteen months been under special observation
there.

This person was a Frenchman named Thomas Roch, forty-five years of
age. He was, beyond question, suffering from some mental malady, but
expert alienists admitted that he had not entirely lost the use of
his reasoning faculties. It was only too evident that he had lost all
notion of things as far as the ordinary acts of life were concerned;
but in regard to subjects demanding the exercise of his genius, his
sanity was unimpaired and unassailable--a fact which demonstrates how
true is the _dictum_ that genius and madness are often closely