Mounting another flight of snowy stairs, we came to the wards above those we had just inspected. These were occupied by patients that were not in a state to allow visitors a nearer inspection than observing them through the glass doors. By standing upon a short flight of broad steps that led down to their ward, we were able to do this with perfect security. The hands of all these women were secured in mufflers; some were dancing, others running to and fro at full speed, clapping their hands, and laughing and shouting with the most boisterous merriment. How dreadful is the laugh of madness! how sorrowful the expressions of their diabolical mirth! tears and lamentations would have been less shocking, for it would have seemed more natural.
Among these raving maniacs I recognised the singular face of Grace Marks--no longer sad and despairing, but lighted up with the fire of insanity, and glowing with a hideous and fiend-like merriment. On perceiving that strangers were observing her, she fled shrieking away like a phantom into one of the side rooms. It appears that even in the wildest bursts of her terrible malady, she is continually haunted by a memory of the past. Unhappy girl! when will the long horror of her punishment and remorse be over? When will she sit at the feet of Jesus, clothed with the unsullied garments of his righteousness, the stain of blood washed from her hand, and her soul redeemed, and pardoned, and in her right mind? It is fearful to look at her, and contemplate her fate in connexion with her crime. What a striking illustration does it afford of that awful text, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord!"
There was one woman in this ward, with raven hair and eyes, and a sallow, unhealthy complexion, whom the sight of us transported into a paroxysm of ungovernable rage. She rushed to the door, and doubled her fists at us, and began cursing and swearing at a furious rate, and then she laughed--such a laugh as one might fancy Satan uttered when he recounted, in full conclave, his triumph over the credulity of our first mother. Presently she grew outrageous, and had to be thrown to the ground, and secured by two keepers; but to silence her was beyond their art. She lay kicking and foaming, and uttering words too dreadful for human ears to listen to; and Grace Marks came out from her hiding-place, and performed a thousand mad gambols round her: and we turned from the piteous scene,--and I, for one, fervently thanked God for my sanity, and inwardly repeated those exquisite lines of the peasant bard of my native county:
"Oh, Thou, who bidd'st the vernal juices rise,
Thou on whose blast autumnal foliage flies;
Let peace ne'er leave me, nor my heart grow cold,
Whilst life and sanity are mine to hold."
We cast but a cursory glance on the men who occupied the opposite ward. We had seen enough of madness, and the shrieks from the outrageous patients above, whom strangers have seldom nerve enough to visit, quickened our steps as we hurried from the place.
We looked into the large ball-room before we descended the stairs, where these poor creatures are allowed at stated times to meet for pleasure and amusement. But such a spectacle would be to me more revolting than the scene I had just witnessed; the delirium of their frightful disease would be less shocking in my eyes than the madness of their mirth. The struggling gleams of sense and memory in these unhappy people reminded me a beautiful passage in "Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy":
"On all things created remaineth the half-effaced signature of God;