“Oh, easily enough,” rejoined the other.  “I suppose I must have been senseless for some time; for, on coming to myself, I found this gash in my head, and the ground covered with blood.  However, no one had discovered me, so I contrived to drag myself to my horse.  I thought if you were living, and not captured, I should find you here,—­and I was right.  I kept watch over you, for fear of a surprise on the part of Jonathan.  But what’s to be done?”

“The first thing I do,” replied Jack, “will be to visit my poor mother in Bedlam.”

“You’d better take care of your mother’s son instead,” rejoined Blueskin.  “It’s runnin’ a great risk.”

“Risk, or no risk, I shall go,” replied Jack.  “Jonathan has threatened to do her some mischief.  I am resolved to see her, without delay, and ascertain if it’s possible to remove her.”

“It’s a hopeless job,” grumbled Blueskin, “and harm will come of it.  What are you to do with a mad mother at a time when you need all your wits to take care of yourself?”

“Don’t concern yourself further about me,” returned Jack.  “Once for all, I shall go.”

“Won’t you take me?”

“No; you must await my return here.”

“Then I must wait a long time,” grumbled Blueskin.  “You’ll never return.”

“We shall see,” replied Jack.  “But, if I should not return, take this purse to Edgeworth Bess.  You’ll find her at Black Mary’s Hole.”

And, having partaken of a hasty breakfast, he set out.  Taking his way along East Smithfield, mounting Little Tower-hill, and threading the Minories and Hounsditch, he arrived without accident or molestation, at Moorfields.

Old Bethlehem, or Bedlam,—­every trace of which has been swept away, and the hospital for lunatics removed to Saint George’s Field,—­was a vast and magnificent structure.  Erected in Moorfields in 1675, upon the model of the Tuileries, it is said that Louis the Fourteenth was so incensed at the insult offered to his palace, that he had a counterpart of St. James’s built for offices of the meanest description.  The size and grandeur of the edifice, indeed, drew down the ridicule of several of the wits of the age:  by one of whom—­the facetious Tom Brown—­it was said, “Bedlam is a pleasant place, and abounds with amusements;—­the first of which is the building, so stately a fabric for persons wholly insensible of the beauty and use of it:  the outside being a perfect mockery of the inside, and admitting of two amusing queries,—­Whether the persons that ordered the building of it, or those that inhabit it, were the maddest? and, whether the name and thing be not as disagreeable as harp and harrow.”  By another—­the no less facetious Ned Ward—­it was termed, “A costly college for a crack-brained society, raised in a mad age, when the chiefs of the city were in a great danger of losing their senses, and so contrived it the more noble for their own reception; or they