One of the most "uncanny" experiences I ever had as a "special" I find graphically described by the late Hon. Lewis Wingfield, who accompanied me on the strange mission.
"Winter without. Snow. A sea of billows drifting across the sky, glittering, frosted--a symphony in metals--silver, aluminium, lead--rendered buoyant for the nonce, ethereal--as though the world were really gone Christmas mad, and, having a sudden attack of topsy-turvydom in its inside, had taken to showering its treasures about the firmament, instead of keeping them snugly put away in mines below ground. A sheet of snow, and bitter white rain driving still. A huge building looming black, its many eyes staring into the dark--lidless, bilious, vacant. This is a hospital. Or is it a factory, disguised with a veneer of the Puginesque? Or an aesthetic barrack? Or an artistic workhouse? Visible yet, under falling snow which has not had time to cover them, are flower-beds, shrub-plots, meandering walks. Too genteel and ambitious for the most aesthetic of workhouses or advanced of hospitals, we wonder what the building is; and our wonder is not decreased by seeing a postern opened in a huge black wall, from which a handful of conspirators creep silently. We rub our eyes. Are we dreaming? Is this, or is it not, the age of scientific marvels, levelling of castes, rampant communism, murder, agrarian outrage, sudden massacre?--the olla podrida which we are pleased to denominate enlightenment? That first black figure is James the Second. Heavens! The Jacobites live yet, and will join, doubtless, with the Fenians and Mr. Bradlaugh, and a posse comitatus of iconoclasts, to upset the reign of order, and add a thorn to the chaplet of our hard-run Premier. James the Second. Not a doubt of it. There he is--periwig, black velvet, and bugles. Where, oh where, is the Great Seal, with which he played ducks and drakes in the Thames? Yet no. This is no Jacobite plot, for His Majesty is followed by no troop of partisans on tiptoe in hose and doublet. He is not seeking to win his own again. A woodman trudges behind--we recognise him, for his name's "Orlando"--(Wingfield himself, in a beautiful costume, which he had made two years previously when playing the part of Orlando in a production of "As You Like It" in Manchester, the Calvert Memorial performance; Miss Helen Faucit (Lady Martin), Rosalind; Herman Merivale, Touchstone; Tom Taylor, Adam; and other well-known celebrities assisting). Then he describes me: "A muffled creature of sinister aspect. Short, auburn-locked, extinguished by a portentous hat, tripping and stumbling over a cloak, or robe, in whose dragging folds he conceals his identity as well as his power of volition, a weird and gruesome phantom. What--oh what--is this hovering ghost? He must be just defunct, for the purgatorial garments fit him not, he stumbles at every step, and when he trips an underdress is unveiled that's like a City waiter's. What is he--the arch conspirator--doing himself? He starts, tries to conceal a book, but we snatch it from him. Sketches! lots of sketches! caricatures, low and vulgar portraits of ourselves! 'What are you?' we scream, 'and why this orgy? Speak, caitiff, or for ever hold your peace!'
"Perceiving that we are in earnest and not to be trifled with, and glare with forbidding mien, the caitiff speaks in trembling accents. 'If you please,' he says, 'I'm the artist from the great illustrated journal; I'm drawing pictures of the lunatics. My disguise is beyond my own control, and trips me up, but I'm told it's becoming.' 'Lunatics!' we echo.
"'Yes,' the caitiff murmurs. 'This is the annual fancy dress ball at Brookwood Asylum. You and I and the doctors and attendants are the only sane people in the place. By-and-by the country gentry will be admitted, and then the tangle will be hopeless, for even in everyday life it's impossible to know who's mad and who isn't. How much more here?'