The Freemason's Daughter: A Novel — page 115: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

106 THE FREEMASONS DAUGHTER. me the man who understands a hint, and reads a glance =: with such tools I can work my way, and defy the law. Confidence,”’ he added, “is awkward. A wise man’s only confederate should be himself.” Our readers can now perfectly understand, from the foregoing conversation, why Mr Crab was so incensed. when, contrary to his orders, he found poor old Gridley in the yard of the madhouse. Although a mere char- latan, as far as medical science was concerned, he had had sufficient experience in his career to know that nothing tends so much to confirm madness as solitude, and listening to the cries of the unhappy inmates of a den like the one over which he presided. How often has the wretched being, whom ignorance or design has consigned to the tender mercies of such a system, become an incurable maniac, from being subjected to the treatment we have described. And yet Mr. Crab was only one of a class—unfor- tunately there are but too many like him. Had any one proposed to him to become an accomplice in such an act, he would have repelled it with indignation. He was too respectable to run the risk of compromising himself. But as long as the villany was only under- stood, and not expressed—as long as he was well paid for his connivance—his establishment, which had been cited in the House of Commons as a model of asylums, was at the disposal of any rascal who had a relative to incarcerate, or a victim to conceal, always, of course, provided it was arranged in a professional way, the -- i i I Comicbooks.co a