a professional gentleman.”  As the Elder concludes his remarks, melancholy sounds are breaking forth in frightful discord.  From strange murmurings it rises into loud wailings and implorings.  “Take me, good Lord, to a world of peace!” sounds in her ears, as they approach through a garden and enter a door that opens into a long room, a store-house of human infirmity, where moans, cries, and groans are made a medium of traffic.  The room, about thirty feet long and twenty wide, is rough-boarded, contains three tiers of narrow berths, one above the other, encircling its walls.  Here and there on the floor are cots, which Mr. Praiseworthy informs us are for those whose cases he would not give much for.  Black nurses are busily attending the sick property; some are carrying bowls of gruel, others rubbing limbs and quieting the cries of the frantic, and again supplying water to quench thirst.  On a round table that stands in the centre of the room is a large medicine-chest, disclosing papers, pills, powders, phials, and plasters, strewn about in great disorder.  A bedlam of ghastly faces presents itself,—­dark, haggard, and frantic with the pains of the malady preying upon the victims.  One poor wretch springs from his couch, crying, “Oh, death! death! come soon!” and his features glare with terror.  Again he utters a wild shriek, and bounds round the room, looking madly at one and another, as if chased by some furious animal.  The figure of a female, whose elongated body seems ready to sink under its disease, sits on a little box in the corner, humming a dolorous air, and looking with glassy eyes pensively around the room at those stretched in their berths.  For a few seconds she is quiet; then, contorting her face into a deep scowl, she gives vent to the most violent bursts of passion,—­holds her long black hair above her head, assumes a tragic attitude, threatens to distort it from the scalp.  “That one’s lost her mind-she’s fitty; but I think the devil has something to do with her fits.  And, though you wouldn’t think it, she’s just as harmless as can be,” Mr. Praiseworthy coolly remarks, looking at Mrs. Rosebrook, hoping she will say something encouraging in reply.  The lady only replies by asking him if he purchased her from her owner?

Mr. Praiseworthy responds in the affirmative, adding that she doesn’t seem to like it much.  He, however, has strong hopes of curing her mind, getting it “in fix” again, and making a good penny on her.  “She’s a’most white, and, unfortunately, took a liking to a young man down town.  Marston owned her then, and, being a friend of hers, wouldn’t allow it, and it took away her senses; he thought her malady incurable, and sold her to me for a little or nothing,” he continues, with great complacency.