Barclay in the pedestrian way, he makes a Lunacy Commissioner of
himself--for nothing!'

'An immense place,' said Goodchild, 'admirable offices, very good
arrangements, very good attendants; altogether a remarkable place.'

'And what did you see there?' asked Mr. Idle, adapting Hamlet's
advice to the occasion, and assuming the virtue of interest, though
he had it not.

'The usual thing,' said Francis Goodchild, with a sigh. 'Long
groves of blighted men-and-women-trees; interminable avenues of
hopeless faces; numbers, without the slightest power of really
combining for any earthly purpose; a society of human creatures who
have nothing in common but that they have all lost the power of
being humanly social with one another.'

'Take a glass of wine with me,' said Thomas Idle, 'and let US be
social.'

'In one gallery, Tom,' pursued Francis Goodchild, 'which looked to
me about the length of the Long Walk at Windsor, more or less--'

'Probably less,' observed Thomas Idle.

'In one gallery, which was otherwise clear of patients (for they
were all out), there was a poor little dark-chinned, meagre man,
with a perplexed brow and a pensive face, stooping low over the
matting on the floor, and picking out with his thumb and forefinger
the course of its fibres. The afternoon sun was slanting in at the