Page:The Harveian oration 1866.djvu/37

 a word more. The chains are removed and he is left in his cell, the door open. Several times he raises himself from his seat and falls again; he had been sitting so long that his legs were stiff and weakened by disuse. In a quarter of an hour he gets on his feet, and comes tottering to the door of his cell. His first look is at the sky, and he cries out in ecstasy, "How beautiful!" During the rest of the day he is constantly in motion, walking up and down the staircases, and exclaiming again and again, "How beautiful! how good!" At night he returned of his own accord to his cell, slept tranquilly on a better bed which had been prepared for him, and during the two remaining years he passed at Bicêtre his paroxysms not once returned, and he made himself useful in the house, exercising a certain authority over the lunatics.

Then the second, an old French officer, who had been in chains thirty-six years. His maniacal delirium had ceased, but reason had not returned. He sat mute and motionless, with rigid and shrunken limbs, still in the same chains, though he had become too weak even to lift them. They were removed, and he was carried to bed in the