The latter therefore hastened to accord the authorization demanded, and added that he would be honored to open the doors of the establishment to the Count d'Artigas.
Healthful House, which contained a select _personnel_, and was assured of the co-operation of the most celebrated doctors in the country, was a private enterprise.

Independent of hospitals and almshouses, but subjected to the surveillance of the State, it comprised all the conditions of comfort and salubrity essential to establishments of this description designed to receive an opulent _clientele_.
It would have been difficult to find a more agreeable situation than that of Healthful House.

On the landward slope of a hill extended a park of two hundred acres planted with the magnificent vegetation that grows so luxuriantly in that part of North America, which is equal in latitude to the Canary and Madeira Islands.

At the furthermost limit of the park lay the wide estuary of the Neuse, swept by the cool breezes of Pamlico Sound and by the winds that blew from the ocean beyond the narrow _lido_ of the coast.
Healthful House, where rich invalids were cared for under such excellent hygienic conditions, was more generally reserved for the treatment of chronic complaints; but the management did not decline to admit patients affected by mental troubles, when the latter were not of an incurable nature.
It thus happened--a circumstance that was bound to attract a good deal of attention to Healthful House, and which perhaps was the motive for the visit of the Count d'Artigas--that a person of world-wide notoriety had for eighteen months been under special observation there.
This person was a Frenchman named Thomas Roch, forty-five years of age.

He was, beyond question, suffering from some mental malady, but expert alienists admitted that he had not entirely lost the use of his reasoning faculties.