The two who were first put in charge of me did not strike me with their fists or even threaten to do so; but their unconscious lack of consideration for my comfort and peace of mind was torture.  They were typical eighteen-dollar-a-month attendants.  Another of the same sort, on one occasion, cursed me with a degree of brutality which I prefer not to recall, much less record.  And a few days later the climax was appropriately capped when still another attendant perpetrated an outrage which a sane man would have resented to the point of homicide.  He was a man of the coarsest type.  His hands would have done credit to a longshoreman—­fingers knotted and nearly twice the normal size.  Because I refused to obey a peremptory command, and this at a time when I habitually refused even on pain of imagined torture to obey or to speak, this brute not only cursed me with abandon, he deliberately spat upon me.  I was a mental incompetent, but like many others in a similar position I was both by antecedents and by training a gentleman.  Vitriol could not have seared my flesh more deeply than the venom of this human viper stung my soul!  Yet, as I was rendered speechless by delusions, I could offer not so much as a word of protest.  I trust that it is not now too late, however, to protest in behalf of the thousands of outraged patients in private and state hospitals whose mute submission to such indignities has never been recorded.

Of the readiness of an unscrupulous owner to employ inferior attendants, I shall offer a striking illustration.  The capable attendant who acted as my protector at this sanatorium has given me an affidavit embodying certain facts which, of course, I could not have known at the time of their occurrence.  The gist of this sworn statement is as follows:  One day a man—­seemingly a tramp—­approached the main building of the sanatorium and inquired for the owner.  He soon found him, talked with him a few minutes, and an hour or so later he was sitting at the bedside of an old and infirm man.  This aged patient had recently been committed to the institution by relatives who had labored under the common delusion that the payment of a considerable sum of money each week would insure kindly treatment.  When this tramp-attendant first appeared, all his visible worldly possessions were contained in a small bundle which he carried under his arm.  So filthy were his person and his clothes that he received a compulsory bath and another suit before being assigned to duty.  He then began to earn his four dollars and fifty cents a week by sitting several hours a day in the room with the aged man, sick unto death.  My informant soon engaged him in conversation.  What did he learn?  First, that the uncouth stranger had never before so much as crossed the threshold of a hospital.  His last job had been as a member of a section-gang on a railroad.  From the roadbed of a railway to the bedside of a man about to die was indeed a change which might have