Then the keepers half-dragged me back to the main prison building, and locked me into this room, until I was myself again is what they said, even though I told them I was better now that the doctor was no longer there with his knives. I said I had a fear of doctors, that was all; of being cut open by them, as some might have a fear of snakes; but they said, That’s enough of your tricks Grace, you just wanted the attention, he was not going to cut you open, he had no knives at all, it was only a callipers you saw, to measure the heads with. You’ve given the Governor’s wife a real fright now but it serves her right, she’s been spoiling you too much for your own good, she’s made quite a pet out of you hasn’t she, our company is hardly good enough for you any more. Well so much the worse, you will have to endure it because now you will have a different sort of attention for a time. Until they have decided what is to be done with you.

This room has only a little window high up with bars on the inside, and a straw-filled mattress. There’s a crust of bread on a tin plate, and a stone crock of water, and a wooden bucket with nothing in it which is there for a chamber pot. I was put in a room like this before they sent me away to the Asylum. I told them I wasn’t mad, that I wasn’t the one, but they wouldn’t listen.

They wouldn’t know mad when they saw it in any case, because a good portion of the women in the Asylum were no madder than the Queen of England. Many were sane enough when sober, as their madness came out of a bottle, which is a kind I knew very well. One of them was in there to get away from her husband, who beat her black and blue, he was the mad one but nobody would lock him up; and another said she went mad in the autumns, as she had no house and it was warm in the Asylum, and if she didn’t do a fair job of running mad she would freeze to death; but then in the spring she would become sane again because it was good weather and she could go off and tramp in the woods and fish, and as she was part Red Indian she was handy at such things. I would like to do that myself if I knew how, and if not afraid of the bears.