46 
IV. JULY, 1913— JANUARY, 1914 
dispose of them. If they are allowed to remain on the 
station they disturb us with their cries all the night 
through, and I have to get up again and again to 
quieten them with a subcutaneous injection. I can 
look back on several terrible nights which resulted in 
my feeling tired for many a day afterwards. The diffi- 
culty can be surmounted in the dry season, for then I 
can make the mental patients and their friends camp 
out on a sandbank about 600 yards away, although 
getting across to see them twice a day consumes a great 
deal both of time and of energy. 
The condition of these poor creatures out here is 
dreadful. The natives do not know how to protect 
themselves from them. Confinement is impossible, as 
they can at any time break out of a bamboo hut. They 
are therefore bound with cords of bast, but that only 
makes their condition worse, and the final result almost 
always is that they are somehow or other got rid of. 
One of the Samkita missionaries told me once that a 
couple of years before, while sitting one Sunday in his 
house, he had heard loud cries in a neighbouring village. 
He got up and started off to see what was the matter, 
but met a native who told him it was only that some 
children were having the sand flies cut out from their 
feet ; he need not worry, but might go home again. 
He did so, but learnt the next day that one of the vil- 
lagers, who had become insane, had been bound hand 
and foot and thrown into the water. 
My first contact with a mentally-diseased native 
happened at night. I was knocked up and taken to a 
palm tree to which an elderly woman was bound. 
Around a fire in front of her sat the whole of her family, 
and behind them was the black forest wall. It was a 
