all Morrell and tell him I intended trying the
experiment, he was prevented by the guards from replying. Me they could
only curse, for, in so far as I was in the jacket for a ten days' bout, I
was beyond all threat of punishment.

I remember remarking at the time my serenity of mind. The customary pain
of the jacket was in my body, but my mind was so passive that I was no
more aware of the pain than was I aware of the floor beneath me or the
walls around me. Never was a man in better mental and spiritual
condition for such an experiment. Of course, this was largely due to my
extreme weakness. But there was more to it. I had long schooled myself
to be oblivious to pain. I had neither doubts nor fears. All the
content of my mind seemed to be an absolute faith in the over-lordship of
the mind. This passivity was almost dream-like, and yet, in its way, it
was positive almost to a pitch of exaltation.

I began my concentration of will. Even then my body was numbing and
prickling through the loss of circulation. I directed my will to the
little toe of my right foot, and I willed that toe to cease to be alive
in my consciousness. I willed that toe to die--to die so far as I, its
lord, and a different thing entirely from it, was concerned. There was
the hard struggle. Morrell had warned me that it would be so. But there
was no flicker of doubt to disturb my faith. I knew that that toe would
die, and I knew when it was dead. Joint by joint it had died under the
compulsion of my will.

The rest was easy, but slow, I will admit. Joint by joint, toe by toe,
all the toes of both my feet ceased to be. And joint by joint, the
process went on. Came the time when my flesh below the ankles had
ceased. Came the time when all below my knees had ceased.

Such was the pitch of my perfect exaltation, that I knew not the
slightest prod of rejoicing at my success. I knew nothing save that I
was making my body die. All that was I was devoted to that sole task. I
performed the work as thoroughly as any mason laying bricks, and I
regarded the work as just about as commonplace as would a brick-mason
regard his work.

At the end of an hour my body was dead to the hips, and from the hips up,
joint by joint, I continued to will the ascending death.

It was when I reached the level of my heart that the first blurring and
dizzying of my consciousness' occurred. For fear that I should lose
consciousness, I willed to hold th