Rev. H. Chase penned out two years and four months of his asylum life spent in Utica asylum. I believe it was an oversight in his friends in sending him there. The Reverend remarks that he is not aware that anybody in or out of the church looks upon him otherwise than before he went to the institution. I would be glad if I could have as much charity as the Reverend. But I have no confidence in the flesh; since I left the asylum my reputation has been encroached upon by the slanderer's tongue, by magistrate, by the foreman in the great mowing machine shop at Falls, by grandfathers, behind my back, before children, who have said to me, "Grand Pa says that you are crazy, and asks when are you going back to the asylum."
Let those slanderers know we have as much feeling as a toad, and try to become gentlemen.
Before I went to the asylums as a patient I was totally ignorant of the character and secret workings of these popular institutions. I was also totally ignorant and understood not the different modes and operations practiced in sending patients to insane or lunatic asylums.
LAW, AND DIFFERENT MODES PRACTICED IN SENDING PATIENTS TO LUNATIC ASYLUMS.
I learned from ex-Judge Robertson and others the law to send a patient to a lunatic asylum. Two physicians examine the patient, pronounce him or her insane, by oath; the county judge being notified to this effect, issues an order and the patient is sent to the smut mill of hell or to a lunatic asylum.
It must not be understood that the same mode of operation is practiced in all cases. Some patients are supported in the Troy institution solely by the county; while others by the patient himself or herself, for instance, as General Schuyler, whose guardian paid $10 per week for his board, he died in an adjoining room to me, fared no better than Bacon and others (property sold since for $20,000).
I entered the Brattleborough institution as a private; it was not necessary to consult doctors, judges or jurors; I was a husband; Brother B. gave bonds for security; I heard him call for them, and saw the doctor hand them to him before we left; suppose it to have been a wife or a child, it would have been all the same. When Brother B. came for me to go home from the Troy Asylum, October 13, 1870, we met Steward Harrison. I asked him for my trunk and clothing, but have not as yet obtained it. I shall ask once more. Oh! how much I needed my overcoat in the cold fall and winter after I got home, going to and from my shop; I well remember what my wife and daughter said after cordially greeting me, "We don't expect you to do any thing;" thought I, "these feeble women can't support me and themselves with the needle," and I, joking, said to encourage them, "You will see me coming up this hill, with a half barrel of flour on my back" (at the time a pail of water was all I could carry up stairs); sure enough, before January, I surprised my family by sending up the hill a barrel of flour and 160 pounds of pork, besides many other necessaries; these I earned working upon my knees part of the time, and they did not set us back, but came good when I lay sick in January and February, 1872, nigh unto death with inflammation of the lungs; but thanks be to the great Giver, in that sickness I had a beloved wife to smooth my pillow, and an affectionate daughter to administer the necessary cordials.
My daughter writes as follows, before I left the asylum:
Pittstown, September 23, 1870.