332 ALL THE YEAR ROUND, [January 28, 1860.]

heights; then we moved on with govern-
ment-commission formality to the miserable
dining-rooms, imperfectly glazed, and with the
beautiful prospect boarded out, much to Dr.
Logoff's righteous indignation. Then we
went to the sick-ward, where we found two
men washing their faces, and whispering with
hideous witch glee in a conspiracy mutter;
now and then, as they turned and looked at us,
breaking out into " fatuous laughter," as Legoff,
always longing to pick a hole in the establish-
ment, called it. From these poor wretches we
were drawn by the querulous tears and prayers
of a poor old man, who rose from his bed to
entreat us for aid, for he was torn with pain,
and as he spoke, he writhed and struggled as
with an enemy. Coldly, and as a matter of
course, the commission, deaf and dumb, passed
by on the other side.

"Old man dying of sheer inanition and want
of vital power," said Legoff.

"He is a troublesome, bad fellow," said the
turnkey. " He eats his food as well as any of
them, gentlemen."

Turnkeys are generally offended by any sym-
pathy evinced for those under their care.

As we passed out by the yellow-washed
fountain into the outer portico, we found the
turnkeys watching a quiet calm Turk, who,
under a network trellis of vines in the outer
portico of the madhouse, sat patiently at his
task of illuminating a sheet of white paper in
the Persian manner. He hardly looked up as
he saw us, but, with a self-satisfied smile went
on with his curving flowers, and azure flourishes,
and crimson tendrils, which made the cretin boy
clap his hands and stamp his naked feet with
delight, and even the bewitched man to smile
gravely: though as for the negro saint, nothing
could allure him from his fakir attitude and
meditative torpor.

"That poor fellow," said Tricoupi, as we
walked back to the doctor's smoking-room,
"is a house-painter. At home he tears every-
thing to pieces, and threatens to murder his
wife and children; but directly he is brought
here he becomes soothed and tranquil, and sits
down to his illumination. I have much of his
work here (taking down a roll of drawings); and
it is remarkable that all these were executed by
him without sketch or measurement. He begins
at the left-hand side of the paper, and covers it all
over with a perfect, harmonious, well-balanced
pattern."

As we rode musingly home, we talked, now of
the mad painter, now of the mad Turkish doctor:
Dr. Legoff impressing upon me the necessity
of instant reform in the Demir-Khan, and espe-
cially of ousting that false, self-reliant, ignorant
man, Dr. Tricoupi (whom I rather liked, but dare
not tell Legoff so). My violent medical friend
then began talking of the state of the govern-
ment madhouse we had just seen when he visited

it first, twenty-six years ago. It was bad enough
now, with its unglazed windows, dirty pigeon-
infested roofs, unclassified maniacs, brutal turn-
keys; it was without padded rooms, amusements,
or annual inspection. Men were still picked up
raving in the street, and thrown in there, and
left to come out when they could persuade cruel
people, interested in their detention, that they were
sane. " In the very first room," he said, " that he
visited in 1833, there were four men chained by
massive iron collars to rings in the four corners.
They were crouched on the sunken stone floor,
benumbed with cold, nothing on but a scanty
blanket; their eyes were staring and fierce, their
mouths sullen and savage. The first he
spoke to, said he should be quite well if out-
side the walls; that, two years before, he had
been brought in when drunk, and that he was
no more crazy than the keeper. The second
told him he was a captain in the Turkish army,
and had been brought there when delirious with
fever. He did not know why he was still im-
prisoned, but there was no appeal to be made.
In the next cell was a half-naked Turk, an
idiot, dying of dysentery. There he sat, care-
less of death, shivering with cold, yet chattering
like an ape to himself, and breaking out every
now and then into shrieks of laughter. Close
by him, sat a young man with the face of an
apostle—as Mr. Willis, the American writer, who
saw him, truly observed. He had tied up his
chain to the grating, to relieve himself of the
weight. The cells were all cold, wet, filthy, and
miserable. The inmates were fed, like beasts,
at certain hours, and the doors of their cells kept
open, that visitors might indulge their curiosity.
The keeper, with stolid indifference, showed (he
remembered) one poor wretch, a dervish, who
had been chained in the same corner for twenty
years. He never slept for more than a few
minutes, and repeated prayers incessantly; his
hair was tangled like a wild beast's mane, his
nails had grown to claws. Near him was a
well-dressed, rational-looking, renegade Greek,
who told Willis he had lost his reason, and was
glad that he was carefully confined. The boys
who came with the visitors tormented him
cruelly by looking through the grating of the
cell and pulling his chain."

The next madhouse I visited in Constanti-
nople, was the Greek one:—a far better one,
as I shall show in my next.

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