Page:The Diothas, or, A far look ahead (IA diothasorfarlook01macn).pdf/74

 and surroundings was recommended. His mother, who had been in frequent communication with me on the subject, commended her son to my best care. I accepted the trust, and Ismar Thiusen arrived this morning. To my pleasant surprise, he showed no outward traces of his mental malady. On the contrary, he seemed unusually intelligent and observant.

It might be the fatigue resulting from his long ramble round the city, it might be the excitement of new scenes. At all events, soon after reaching my office, where I attend to certain affairs that require my occasional presence in the city, he fell into a deep sleep, which soon became cataleptic in character. At first alarmed, I soon recognized the supreme importance of the opportunity thus presented to me of investigating the state of my patient's mind. Both as family friend, and as mental physician, it was my duty to shrink from no means of obtaining guidance for my treatment.

By well-known means I caused him to converse freely, taking great care not to influence the direction of his thoughts. What I thus discovered fully justified my action. Since his apparent recovery, my ward had been living in an imaginary world. The facts of his real existence, as presented to him through the distorting medium of his hallucination, assumed the forms of correlated facts as they had existed in that distant past on which he had concentrated all the powers of his mind.

My course of action was soon resolved on. There was but one path by which he could be brought to a clear perception of the objective facts of existence,—that was, to begin and become acquainted with these facts as