The Broadmoor attendants had noticed some improvement in the very early 1880s, when he first replied to the appeal from Mill Hill. But as the years went on, and as Minor passed dejected and alone through the milestone of his fiftieth birthday in June 1884—his elderly stepmother having visited him the month before, on her way home to the United States from Ceylon, where she had stayed since her husband’s death—so the old ills returned, reinvigorated, reinforced.
