The arts and crafts shops being the basic principle of the “occupation and exercise cure,” the capitalist was introduced to an efficient and businesslike young woman, the instructress, who explained to him the nature of the avocations in which he might choose to interest himself.  Here he found his fellow-patients busily and apparently congenially employed.  In one of the shops a recent alumnus of one of the leading universities, who had undergone a nervous breakdown after graduation, was patiently hammering a sheet of brass with a view to converting it into a lampshade; a matron of nearly sixty, who had previously spent eight years in sanatoriums, practically bedridden, was setting type in the printing office with greater activity than she had known before for two decades; two girls, one sixteen and the other twelve, the latter inclined to hysteria and the former once subject to acute nervous attacks, taking the cure in charge of trained nurses, were chattering gayly over a loom in the construction of a silk rug; a prominent business man from a Western city, like the New York capitalist broken down from overwork, was earnestly modeling in clay what he hoped might eventually become a jardiniere; one of last season’s debutantes among the fashionables, who had been leading a life of too strenuous gayety that had told on her nerves, was constructing a stamped leather portfolio with entire absorption; and half a dozen others, mostly young women, were engaged at wood-carving, bookbinding, block-printing, tapestry weaving, or basket-making, each one of them under treatment for some nervous derangement.

The new patient decided to try his hand at basket-making; and, although he figured out that it would take him about four days to turn out a product that might sell for ten cents, he was soon so much interested in mastering the manual details of the craft that he was disinclined to put the work aside when the medical superintendent suggested a horseback ride.  When, at the advice of the specialist, the capitalist had decided to try the occupation and exercise cure, he did so with little faith that it would restore him to health, though he felt that there was perhaps a slight chance that it might help him.  The remedy seemed to him too simple to overcome a disease that was paralyzing his energies.  To his great surprise, he began to improve at once; and though for the first week he got little sleep, and his dizziness, with the pain in the back of his neck and his apprehensions, continued to recur for weeks, they did so at always increasing intervals.

He learned bookbinding, and sent to his library for some favorite volumes, and put them into new dress; he made elaborate waste-paper baskets, and beat brass into ornamental desk-trays, which he proudly presented to his friends in the city as specimens of his skill.  Work with him, as with the others of the patients, was continually varied by recreation.  In the summer months there were lawn-tennis, golf, croquet,