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we delivered regularly, were on the same street as the asylum, so that I had the frequent opportunity of surveying it in the course of our rounds.
    The building itself was difficult to see. It was set far back, perhaps fifty yards, from the street, behind beautifully landscaped grounds. There were avenues of arbor vitae, several magnificent poplar trees, from which the Lodge took its name, and a group of tall, low-hanging willows, under which a pair of Grecian stone benches glowed in the shadow. The driveway was bordered with privet and wound in a graceful curve from the street between the boles of the poplars. At the back of these grounds, thickly planted at its base with rose-of-Sharon bushes, stood the main building. It was actually a converted mansion (although I did not learn this until many years later), three stories in height, with a wide screened porch surrounding it on three sides, from which a set of broad wooden steps descended to the drive. It was an old Gothic building, typical of the early part of the century, full of bays and towers and long dormers, surmounted by a slate mansard roof, through which five ivy-covered chimneys, their moist bricks showing between the leaves, projected comfortably. All of its many windows were barred with heavy diagonal wire netting. (To the side were several small auxiliary buildings which I never noticed in very great detail: a small cottage, a shed, and a kind of converted loft with a flight of outside stairs ascending to it.)
    It was always very quiet. In the late afternoons the blend of sunlight and shadow lying on the soft lawns and the ivied walls was calm and lovely. There was nothing grim or terrible about it; never were there faces peering from the high barred windows, or the sound of screams or violence within. With its elaborate and spacious grounds and its air of age and dignity, it had, indeed, a peaceful, almost an idyllic, aspect. And yet, standing in the sunny street to look at it, as I so often did, I would feel my mind shadowed and solemnized for a moment with a sudden delicate pall of awe, for children are moved by the mystery of madness, as they are moved by the other mysteries of life.
    There is one picture of the place which I must set down here: the most enduring which I have of it. When I think of the Lodge this is the way I always see it, in a sudden wan, bright image, apparently preserved forever, which is projected somewhere in my mind.
    I shall have to regress a little in order to reconstruct it fully, for I feel that the picture for some reason would not be complete unless it were presented together with—framed by, as it were—the event which immediately preceded it. Nothing ever is seen clearly; always the pathos of the perceiver helps to create the thing perceived, as the image of water in sunlight is illumined by the thirst of the observer. In some such way, I believe, the event of which I speak helped to color and create this image of the Lodge which was to become so important for me, whose magic was to cast so deep a spell upon my life.
    A short time earlier I had delivered a box of groceries to a Mrs. Hallworth. Her house was in the close neighborhood of the Lodge, a prosperous, well-kept place with a gardener usually busy in the front yard, mowing the lawn or kneeling at the walk to clip the edges. She was a regular customer of ours; and this was the fourth consecutive week that I had delivered her order, although I had never seen her. Ordinarily I was admitted to the kitchen by the maid, a sullen young Negress who opened the door silently with an expression of great suspicion and dislike. On this morning, however, she did not appear. No one answered my tapping against the light frame of the screen door which opened onto the back porch. I pressed my face against it and called, “Groceries!”
    From a small high window in the side wall of the house a petulant female voice shouted, “What is it?”
    “Groceries, ma’am,” I