James Ravenscroft

“ It is not a picture that you would want to carry with you."
The attendant’s voice was one of gentle solicitude and pathos. Doubtless long service in the place had made it so. It was a private sanitarium, in the National Capital, for the hopelessly insane, to which my profession as specialist and alienist gained me admittance.
The sounds hypnotized me; I could not turn away. The small iron grating in the upper part of the door drew me like a magnet, and I went and looked into the room. ”

“ The attendant hesitated.
"Not every one should hear that story" he remarked, thoughtfully, as if half talking to himself, "but, of course, with you, a specialist, it is different."
He took me to a chair on a porch. From there I could see into a section of the grounds of the inmates, where benighted beings were engaged in assuming their various and fantastic roles of madness.
"His name I shall not tell you," he began, "for that is a secret and very properly so. I shall only relate briefly what happened to him, as it came to me from his mother. His people are prominent and wealthy. ”

“ When they come here to see him they wait until he is comparatively free from symptoms of an attack, and then they go look in at the grating, as you did. Strange to tell, he recognizes only one of them, a sister, but he believes her to be a sister who died some two or three years before he became insane.
"Every possible care is given him and every famous specialist in the country has examined him. They say it is useless to hope; that he will be raving mad to the end of his days. When the fury seizes him he will hurl at his imaginary tormentors anything he can lift. ”