On more than one occasion my chameleonlike temperament has enabled me to adjust myself to new conditions, but never has it served me better than it did at the time of which I write.  A free man on New Year’s Day, enjoying the pleasures of a congenial club life, four days later I found myself again under the lock and key of an institution for the insane.  Never had I enjoyed life in New York more than during those first days of that new year.  To suffer so rude a change was, indeed, enough to arouse a feeling of discontent, if not despair; yet, aside from the momentary initial shock, my contentment was in no degree diminished.  I can say with truth that I was as complacent the very moment I recrossed the threshold of that “retreat” as I had been when crossing and recrossing at will the threshold of my club.

Of everything I thought and did during the interesting weeks which followed, I have a complete record.  The moment I accepted the inevitable, I determined to spend my time to good advantage.  Knowing from experience that I must observe my own case, if I was to have any detailed record of it, I provided myself in advance with notebooks.  In these I recorded, I might almost say, my every thought and action.  The sane part of me, which fortunately was dominant, subjected its temporarily unruly part to a sort of scientific scrutiny and surveillance.  From morning till night I dogged the steps of my restless body and my more restless imagination.  I observed the physical and mental symptoms which I knew were characteristic of elation.  An exquisite light-heartedness, an exalted sense of wellbeing, my pulse, my weight, my appetite—­all these I observed and recorded with a care that would have put to the blush a majority of the doctors in charge of mental cases in institutions.

But this record of symptoms, though minute, was vague compared to my reckless analysis of my emotions.  With a lack of reserve characteristic of my mood, I described the joy of living, which, for the most part, then consisted in the joy of writing.  And even now, when I reread my record, I feel that I cannot overstate the pleasure I found in surrendering myself completely to that controlling impulse.  The excellence of my composition seemed to me beyond criticism.  And, as to one in a state of elation, things are pretty much as they seem, I was able to experience the subtle delights which, I fancy, thrill the soul of a master.  During this month of elation I wrote words enough to fill a book nearly as large as this one.  Having found that each filling of my fountain pen was sufficient for the writing of about twenty-eight hundred words, I kept a record of the number of times I filled it.  This minute calculation I carried to an extreme.  If I wrote for fifty-nine minutes, and then read for seventeen, those facts I recorded.  Thus, in my diary and out of it, I wrote and wrote until the tips of my thumb and forefinger grew numb.  As this numbness increased and general weariness of the hand set in, there came a gradual flagging of my creative impulse until a very normal unproductivity supervened.