you have just seen. She thinks she is a queen, and is perfectly
harmless. You must be careful to humor her illusion. There she is--let
me present you."

She was a woman of immense size, enormously fat, with broad red face,
and a self-satisfied smirk, dressed in some sort of flaming scarlet
stuff, profusely tinseled all over, making a gorgeously ridiculous
effect. She received me with a mixture of mock dignity and smiling
condescension, and surveying herself admiringly, she asked:

"How do you like my dress?"

It was not the first time that royalty had shown itself not above the
little weaknesses of human nature. On being told that her apparel was
indeed magnificent, she was much pleased, and drew herself up proudly,
and was a picture of ecstatic vanity. Are the real queens as happy? When
they lay aside their royal robes for their grave clothes, will not the
pageantry which was the glory of their lives seem as vain as that of
this tinseled queen of the mad-house? Where is happiness, after all? Is
it in the circumstances, the external conditions? or, is it in the mind?
Such were the thoughts passing through my mind, when a man approached
with a violin. Every eye brightened, and the queen seemed to thrill with
pleasure in every nerve.

"This is the only way we can get some of them to take any exercise. The
music rouses them, and they will dance as long as they are permitted to
do so."

The fiddler struck up a lively tune, and the queen, with marvelous
lightness of step and ogling glances, ambled up to a tall, raw-boned