“The first thing to do,” he said, with renewed animation, “is to find a sanitarium where you will get a complete rest for a while, and allow your nerves to get into a better condition.  I myself will go with you and select a suitable one.”

So he took me to a mad-house in the Catskills.  It was on a bare mountain frequented only by infrequent frequenters.  You could see nothing but stones and boulders, some patches of snow, and scattered pine trees.  The young physician in charge was most agreeable.  He gave me a stimulant without applying a compress to the arm.  It was luncheon time, and we were invited to partake.  There were about twenty inmates at little tables in the dining room.  The young physician in charge came to our table and said:  “It is a custom with our guests not to regard themselves as patients, but merely as tired ladies and gentlemen taking a rest.  Whatever slight maladies they may have are never alluded to in conversation.”

My doctor called loudly to a waitress to bring some phosphoglycerate of lime hash, dog-bread, bromo-seltzer pancakes, and nux vomica tea for my repast.  Then a sound arose like a sudden wind storm among pine trees.  It was produced by every guest in the room whispering loudly, “Neurasthenia!”—­except one man with a nose, whom I distinctly heard say, “Chronic alcoholism.”  I hope to meet him again.  The physician in charge turned and walked away.

An hour or so after luncheon he conducted us to the workshop—­say fifty yards from the house.  Thither the guests had been conducted by the physician in charge’s understudy and sponge-holder—­a man with feet and a blue sweater.  He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face; but the Armour Packing Company would have been delighted with his hands.

“Here,” said the physician in charge, “our guests find relaxation from past mental worries by devoting themselves to physical labour—­recreation, in reality.”

There were turning-lathes, carpenters’ outfits, clay-modelling tools, spinning-wheels, weaving-frames, treadmills, bass drums, enlarged-crayon-portrait apparatuses, blacksmith forges, and everything, seemingly, that could interest the paying lunatic guests of a first-rate sanitarium.

“The lady making mud pies in the corner,” whispered the physician in charge, “is no other than—­Lula Lulington, the authoress of the novel entitled ‘Why Love Loves.’  What she is doing now is simply to rest her mind after performing that piece of work.”

I had seen the book.  “Why doesn’t she do it by writing another one instead?” I asked.

As you see, I wasn’t as far gone as they thought I was.

“The gentleman pouring water through the funnel,” continued the physician in charge, “is a Wall Street broker broken down from overwork.”

I buttoned my coat.

Others he pointed out were architects playing with Noah’s arks, ministers reading Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution,” lawyers sawing wood, tired-out society ladies talking Ibsen to the blue-sweatered sponge-holder, a neurotic millionaire lying asleep on the floor, and a prominent artist drawing a little red wagon around the room.