heart as did this bitter ordeal. I resisted weakly,
and, after the muff was adjusted and locked, for the first time since
my mental collapse I wept. And I remember distinctly why I wept. The
key that locked the muff unlocked in imagination the door of the home
in New Haven which I believed I had disgraced--and seemed for a time to
unlock my heart. Anguish beat my mind into a momentary sanity, and with
a wholly sane emotion I keenly felt my imagined disgrace. My thoughts
centred on my mother. Her (and other members of the family) I could
plainly see at home in a state of dejection and despair over her
imprisoned and heartless son. I wore the muff each night for several
weeks, and for the first few nights the unhappy glimpses of a ruined
home recurred and increased my sufferings.

It was not always as an instrument of restraint that the muff was
employed. Frequently it was used as a means of discipline on account of
supposed stubborn disobedience. Many times was I roughly overpowered by
two attendants who locked my hands and coerced me to do whatever I had
refused to do. My arms and hands were my only weapons of defence. My
feet were still in plaster casts, and my back had been so severely
injured as to necessitate my lying flat upon it most of the time. It
was thus that these unequal fights were fought. And I had not even the
satisfaction of tongue-lashing my oppressors, for I was practically
speechless.

My attendants, like most others in such institutions, were incapable of
understanding the operations of my mind, and what they could not
understand they would seldom tolerate. Yet they were not entirely to
blame. They were simply carrying out to the letter orders received from
the doctors.

To ask a patient in my condition to take a little medicated sugar
seemed reasonable. But from my point of view my refusal was
justifiable. That innocuous sugar disc to me seemed saturated with the
blood of loved ones; and so much as to touch it was to shed their
blood--perhaps on the very scaffold on which I was destined to die. For
myself I cared little. I was anxious to die, and eagerly would I have
taken the sugar disc had I had any reason to believe that it was deadly
poison. The sooner I could die and be forgotten, the better for all
with whom I had ever come in contact. To continue to live was simply to
be the treacherous tool of unscrupulous detectives, eager to
exterminate my innocent relatives and friends, if so their fam