This fellow was one of those men who are remarkable for thick, massive, and saturnine features.  At a first glance he was not at all ill-looking; but, on examining his beetle brows, which met in a mass of black thick hair across his face, and on watching the dull, selfish, cruel eyes that they hung over—­dead as they were to every generous emotion, and incapable of kindling even at cruelty itself—­it was impossible for any man in the habit of observing nature closely not to feel that a brutal ruffian, obstinate, indurated, and unscrupulous, was before him.  His forehead was low but broad, and the whole shape of his head such as would induce an intelligent phrenologist to pronounce him at once a thief and a murderer.

The stranger, after a survey or two, felt his blood boil at the contemplation of his very visage, which was at once plausible and diabolical in expression.  After some preliminary chat the latter said: 

“Your establishment, sir, is admirably situated here.  It is remote and isolated; and these, I suppose, are advantages?”

“Why, yes, sir,” replied the doctor, “the further we remove our patients from human society, the better.  The exhibition of reason has, in general, a bad effect upon the insane.”

“Upon what principle do you account for that?” asked the stranger.  “To me it would appear that the reverse of the proposition ought to hold true.”

“That may be,” replied the other; “but no man can form a correct opinion of insane persons who has not mingled with them, or had them under his care.  The contiguity of reason—­I mean in the persons of those who approach them—­always exercises a dangerous influence upon lunatics; and on this account, I sometimes place those who are less insane as keepers upon such as are decidedly so.”

“Does not that, sir, seem very like setting the blind to lead the blind?”

“No,” replied the other, with a heavy, I heartless laugh, “your analogy fails; it is rather like setting a man with one eye to guide another who has none.”

“But why should not a man who has two guide him better?”

“Because the consciousness that there is but the one eye between both of them, will make him proceed more cautiously.”

“But that in the blind is an act of reason,” replied the stranger, “which cannot be applied to the insane, in whom reason is deficient.”

“But where reason does not exist,” said the doctor, “we must regulate them by the passions.”

“By the exercise of which passion do you gain the greatest ascendency over them?” asked the stranger.

“By fear, of course.  We can do nothing, at least very little, without inspiring terror.”

“Ah,” thought the stranger, “I have now got the key to his conduct!—­But, sir,” he added, “we never fear and love the same object at the same time.”

“True enough, sir,” replied the ruffian; “but who could or ought to calculate upon the attachment of a madman?  Boys are corrected more frequently than men, because their reason is not developed:  and those in whom it does not exist, or in whom it has been impaired, must be subjected to the same discipline.  Terror, besides, is the principle upon which reason itself, and all society, are governed.”