Lancashire Humour Part 12

jerking my thumb towards the window through which the Asylum buildings were visible in the distance.

"Yai, it is," he replied, again looking intently in my face.

"There's a lot of mad folk in it, I suppose?"

"Ay, there is," was the answer.

"More than two thousand," I remarked.

"Ay, mooar than two thousand."

Here there was a pause for a minute in our conversation, when he blurted out with startling suddenness:

"Aw'm one o' th' mad 'uns!"

The information came upon me so unexpectedly, and was conveyed with such emphasis, and in such gruesome manner, that I could not help an involuntary start and an instinctive glance towards the waiting-room door to see whether it was open. Collecting myself, and pus.h.i.+ng my chair back a bit to put a little more distance between us, I resumed:

"You're one o' th' mad 'uns, are you?"

"Ay, aw am."

"You don't look like it, friend," I said.

"Ay, but aw am, though!"

"Well, and how do you happen to be here?" I inquired.

"Why?" he replied, "Aw'm th' asylum poastman. Aw come to meet th'

trains as brings th' poast-bags."

Just then the lilliputian train from the Asylum ran into the siding at the station, and my mad friend, shouldering the letter-bags that he had placed at the waiting-room door, got into the lunatic carriage and I into the other. The engine whistled, and away we sped down the line towards the abode of sorrow.

There was a pathetic humour in the conversation I had had with "one o' th' mad 'uns," and my reflections turned upon the varying degrees of madness that afflict not only the inmates of an asylum, but also we their more favoured brethren outside its walls.