Ralph was delighted, so delighted that he came near kissing good Miss Nancy Sawyer, whose plain face was glorified by her generosity.

But he did not go to the poor-house immediately.  He waited until he saw Bill Jones, the Superintendent of the Poor-House, and Pete Jones, the County Commissioner, who was still somewhat shuck up, ride up to the court-house.  Then he drove out of the village, and presently hitched his horse to the poor-house fence, and took a survey of the outside.  Forty hogs, nearly ready for slaughter, wallowed in a pen in front of the forlorn and dilapidated house; for though the commissioners allowed a claim for repairs at every meeting, the repairs were never made, and it would not do to scrutinize Mr. Jones’s bills too closely, unless you gave up all hope of renomination to office.  One curious effect of political aspirations in Hoopole County, was to shut the eyes that they could not see, to close the ears that they could not hear, and to destroy the sense of smell.  But Ralph, not being a politician, smelled the hog-pen without and the stench within, and saw everywhere the transparent fraud, and heard the echo of Jones’s cruelty.

A weak-eyed girl admitted him, and as he did not wish to make his business known at once, he affected a sort of idle interest in the place, and asked to be allowed to look round.  The weak-eyed girl watched him.  He found that all the women with children, twenty persons in all, were obliged to sleep in one room, which, owing to the hill-slope, was partly under ground, and which had but half a window for light, and no ventilation, except the chance draft from the door.  Jones had declared that the women with children must stay there—­“he warn’t goin’ to have brats a-runnin’ over the whole house.”  Here were vicious women and good women, with their children, crowded like chickens in a coop for market.  And there were, as usual in such places, helpless, idiotic women with illegitimate children.  Of course this room was the scene of perpetual quarreling and occasional fighting.

In the quarters devoted to the insane, people slightly demented and raving maniacs were in the same rooms, while there were also those utter wrecks which sat in heaps on the floor, mumbling and muttering unintelligible words, the whole current of their thoughts hopelessly muddled, turning around upon itself in eddies never ending.

“That air woman,” said the weak-eyed girl, “used to holler a heap when she was brought in here.  But Pap knows how to subjue ’em.  He slapped her in the mouth every time she hollered.  She don’t make no furss now, but jist sets down that way all day, and keeps a-whisperin’.”

Ralph understood it.  When she came in she was the victim of mania; but she had been beaten into hopeless idiocy.  Indeed this state of incurable imbecility seemed the end toward which all traveled.  Shut in these bare rooms, with no treatment, no exercise, no variety, and meager food, cases of slight derangement soon grew into chronic lunacy.