A striking exhibition of fine feeling on the part of a patient was brought to my attention by an assistant physician whom I met while visiting a State Hospital in Massachusetts.  It seems that the woman in question had, at her worst, caused an endless amount of annoyance by indulging in mischievous acts which seemed to verge on malice.  At that time, therefore, no observer would have credited her with the exquisite sensibility she so signally displayed when she had become convalescent and was granted a parole which permitted her to walk at will about the hospital grounds.  After one of these walks, taken in the early spring, she rushed up to my informant and, with childlike simplicity, told him of the thrill of delight she had experienced in discovering the first flower of the year in full bloom—­a dandelion, which, with characteristic audacity, had risked its life by braving the elements of an uncertain season.

“Did you pick it?” asked the doctor.

“I stooped to do so,” said the patient; “then I thought of the pleasure the sight of it had given me—­so I left it, hoping that someone else would discover it and enjoy its beauty as I did.”

Thus it was that a woman, while still insane, unconsciously exhibited perhaps finer feeling than did Ruskin, Tennyson, and Patmore on an occasion the occurrence of which is vouched for by Mr. Julian Hawthorne.  These three masters, out for a walk one chilly afternoon in late autumn, discovered a belated violet bravely putting forth from the shelter of a mossy stone.  Not until these worthies had got down on all fours and done ceremonious homage to the flower did they resume their walk.  Suddenly Ruskin halted and, planting his cane in the ground, exclaimed, “I don’t believe, Alfred—­Coventry, I don’t believe that there are in all England three men besides ourselves who, after finding a violet at this time of year, would have had forbearance and fine feeling enough to refrain from plucking it.”

The reader may judge whether the unconscious display of feeling by the obscure inmate of a hospital for the insane was not finer than the self-conscious raptures of these three men of world-wide reputation.

Is it not, then, an atrocious anomaly that the treatment often meted out to insane persons is the very treatment which would deprive some sane persons of their reason?  Miners and shepherds who penetrate the mountain fastnesses sometimes become mentally unbalanced as a result of prolonged loneliness.  But they usually know enough to return to civilization when they find themselves beginning to be affected with hallucinations.  Delay means death.  Contact with sane people, if not too long postponed, means an almost immediate restoration to normality.  This is an illuminating fact.  Inasmuch as patients cannot usually be set free to absorb, as it were, sanity in the community, it is the duty of those entrusted with their care to treat them with the utmost tenderness and consideration.