Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume One).djvu/136

Rh the Butler Hospital, Rhode Island; the Utica and Bloomingdale Asylums, New York; the Trenton Hospital, the Kirkbride Hospital, and the Philadelphia Alms House, and in none of these institutions did we find any person naked or confined in a cell. The furiously insane were dressed, the arms were tied so as to limit the use of the hands, and the hands were covered with padded mittens. The Worcester Hospital was the poorest institution of all. Our chairman, the Rev. Orin S. Fowler, afterwards a member of Congress, was very indignant, and his report to the Legislature aroused the State from its delusion in regard to the Worcester Hospital. We examined many sites for the contemplated new hospitals, but the Legislature postponed action.

During the year 1847 I was a member of a committee to examine and report upon the securities held by the State. These securities were chiefly the property of the Common School Fund, and they had been derived from the sales of public lands in Maine owned jointly with that State under the agreement made at the time of the separation. Among these securities was a mortgage upon the property of Nathaniel J. Wythe, at Fresh Pond. Mr. Wythe had been a trapper for John Jacob Astor, and he had published a pamphlet upon the region of the Rocky Mountains. Elisha H. Allen afterwards our Consul to Honolulu, and then Chief Justice of Hawaii, and more recently Minister from that country to the United States, was a member of the committee. Mr. Allen and myself were at Fresh Pond together and under the lead of Wythe we went to one of his large ice-houses. The month was August and the men were engaged in removing ice from the house for loading upon the railway cars. From the top of the house to the ground floor must have been sixty feet or more. The cakes of ice were sent down in a run, and by the side of the run there was a narrow foot track, over which the men passed. Mr. Wythe with a lantern led in going up the