hat time someone stole his dog. He brooded over
this so much that he finally jumped into a creek, intending to commit
suicide, but was rescued by bystanders. He has made several other
attempts at suicide in later life. In describing these he elaborates
them with a lot of fanciful trimming, dilates on the importance of the
various situations attending them, and how much uproar they caused
among those who knew of them. At the age of fourteen he had a quarrel
with another boy. Upon being reprimanded by the latter's father, he
could not rest until he had obtained a gun and fired at the boy's
father while the latter was sitting at the supper table with his
family. In relating this incident he states with great vanity that he
fully intended to kill the boy's father; he wasn't going to be
insulted by anyone and let it go at that. Here was probably the first
well-illustrated instance of his pathologic emotionalism, the tendency
to a complete dominance of a certain affect. He was committed to some
sort of an industrial school for a year. Upon his release from there
he went to work in a machine shop in his native town. One day a couple
of gentlemen and a lady walked through the shop and stopped in front
of the machine on which he was working. He did not like this, became
angered, picked up the dog which followed them and threw it into the
oil tank which fed his machine. At sixteen he ran away from home. He
gives a history of an industrial career and apparently he had no
difficulty in learning a trade, and it is quite likely that he was a
skilled workman. His entire industrial career, however, is
characterized by an inability to fit harmoniously into the situation
at hand, not because of an intellectual deficiency, but because of the
disharmony between his various mental faculties. His extreme
sensitiveness and emotionalism, his vindictiveness, the total lack of
a sense of responsibility, his impulsive existence, all these, were
always at play in his relations with man. If to these be added his
extreme egotism and vanity, the reasons for his conflicts become
clear. "Here, the foreman thought he knew more than I did." "There, I
did not like the way they were running the business," etc. Among his
occupations, saloon-keeping and professional gambling played an
important role. He finally gave up all attempts at leading an honest
existence and turned to crime. Our reco