his troubles. We must note the meticulous
manner in which he carried out the entire procedure. For some time past
he had been in the habit of handing me each morning a uniformly folded
sheet of paper containing the dreams of the previous night. On that
morning he had two of these folded sheets in his vest pocket but handed
me only the above mentioned note, because he says he feared that I would
read only the one containing the dream and miss the other. During the
interview which followed as result of the above note, he handed over to
me a bunch of petitions written by a famous litigant in the criminal
department, which were to have been delivered by the patient to his
relatives with the object of getting them to their final destination.
Aside from the fact that the author of these petitions is by no means a
simpleton, or very credulous, it must have taken a good deal of
ingenuity and skill on the part of the patient to gain this fellow's
confidence, knowing as I do that the latter has a special grudge against
the patient because they are the only two in the Howard Hall Department
who enjoy some special privileges in common, such as attending chapel
and amusements, etc.

This compulsion of attending chapel, as he puts it, with a negro, has
been the litigant's chief grievance during the past two months, and he
has accordingly expressed himself in some very choice language when
speaking of the patient. Nevertheless the patient has succeeded in
gaining his full confidence, and the interest and pleasure which the
patient manifested in detailing to me his mode of procedure in
accomplishing this is really very striking. It was during this interview
that he stated, "I suppose the reason I never reached the climax when
playing detective is because I have never arrested anyone. This is the
work I would like to do, Doctor, I hope some day I'll be able to get a
job with some detective agency."

I regret to have to omit many interesting details from the analysis of
this case. To me the analysis of this case has been a revelation. For a
number of years past I have been intensely interested in the problem of
recidivism, and although I have had many opportunities to study the
recidivist, and have seen a number of very interesting cases, the
histories of a few of whom I have reported several years ago, I have
always felt that I had never touched the real specific cause of a life
of recidivism in a given individual. Why a man, an appar