The doctor showed no curiosity to hear more. "My object," he went on,
"was merely to be reasonably sure that I was speaking to the right
person, in speaking to you. I may now tell you that I have no personal
interest in trying to discover Mr. Winterfield; I only act as the
representative of an old friend of mine. He is the proprietor of a
private asylum at Sandsworth--a man whose integrity is beyond dispute,
or he would not be my friend. You understand my motive in saying this?"
Proprietors of private asylums are, in these days, the objects of very
general distrust in England. I understood the doctor's motive perfectly.
He proceeded. "Yesterday evening, my friend called upon me, and said
that he had a remarkable case in his house, which he believed would
interest me. The person to whom he alluded was a French boy, whose
mental powers had been imperfectly developed from his childhood. The
mischief had been aggravated, when he was about thirteen years old, by a
serious fright. When he was placed in my asylum, he was not idiotic, and
not dangerously mad--it was a case (not to use technical language) of
deficient intelligence, tending sometimes toward acts of unreasoning
mischief and petty theft, but never approaching to acts of downright
violence.
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