for your guests!  Aye, and when the feast fails them, they make a meal of their entertainer!—­You shudder.—­Are you, then, the first prisoner who has been devoured alive by the vermin that infested his cell?—­Delightful banquet, not ’where you eat, but where you are eaten’!  Your guests, however, will give you one token of repentance while they feed; there will be gnashing of teeth, and you shall hear it, and feel it too perchance!—­And then for meals—­Oh you are daintily off!—­The soup that the cat has lapped; and (as her progeny has probably contributed to the hell broth) why not?  Then your hours of solitude, deliciously diversified by the yell of famine, the howl of madness, the crash of whips, and the broken-hearted sob of those who, like you, are supposed, or driven mad by the crimes of others!—­Stanton, do you imagine your reason can possibly hold out amid such scenes?—­ Supposing your reason was unimpaired, your health not destroyed,—­ suppose all this, which is, after all, more than fair supposition can grant, guess the effect of the continuance of these scenes on your senses alone.  A time will come, and soon, when, from mere habit, you will echo the scream of every delirious wretch that harbors near you; then you will pause, clasp your hands on your throbbing head, and listen with horrible anxiety whether the scream proceeded from you or them.  The time will come, when, from the want of occupation, the listless and horrible vacancy of your hours, you will feel as anxious to hear those shrieks, as you were at first terrified to hear them,—­when you will watch for the ravings of your next neighbor, as you would for a scene on the stage.  All humanity will be extinguished in you.  The ravings of these wretches will become at once your sport and your torture.  You will watch for the sounds, to mock them with the grimaces and bellowings of a fiend.  The mind has a power of accommodating itself to its situation, that you will experience in its most frightful and deplorable efficacy.  Then comes the dreadful doubt of one’s own sanity, the terrible announcer that that doubt will soon become fear, and that fear certainty.  Perhaps (still more dreadful) the fear will at last become a hope,—­shut out from society, watched by a brutal keeper, writhing with all the impotent agony of an incarcerated mind, without communication and without sympathy, unable to exchange ideas but with those whose ideas are only the hideous specters of departed intellect, or even to hear the welcome sound of the human voice, except to mistake it for the howl of a fiend, and stop the ear desecrated by its intrusion,—­ then at last your fear will become a more fearful hope; you will wish to become one of them, to escape the agony of consciousness.  As those who have long leaned over a precipice, have at last felt a desire to plunge below, to relieve the intolerable temptation of their giddiness,* you will hear them laugh amid their wildest paroxysms;