inform me that it is not unusual for those suffering as I did to retain accurate impressions of their experiences while ill.  To laymen this may seem almost miraculous, yet it is not so; nor is it even remarkable.  Assuming that an insane person’s memory is capable of recording impressions at all, remembrance for one in the torturing grip of delusions of persecution should be doubly easy.  This deduction is in accord with the accepted psychological law that the retention of an impression in the memory depends largely upon the intensity of the impression itself, and the frequency of its repetition.  Fear to speak, lest I should incriminate myself and others, gave to my impressions the requisite intensity, and the daily recurrence of the same general line of thought served to fix all impressions in my then supersensitive memory.

Shortly before seven in the morning, on the way to the sanatorium, the train passed through a manufacturing center.  Many workmen were lounging in front of a factory, most of them reading newspapers.  I believed these papers contained an account of me and my crimes, and I thought everyone along the route knew who I was and what I was, and that I was on that train.  Few seemed to pay any attention to me, yet this very fact looked to be a part of some well-laid plan of the detectives.

The sanatorium to which I was going was in the country.  When a certain station was reached, I was carried from the train to a carriage.  At that moment I caught sight of a former college acquaintance, whose appearance I thought was designed to let me know that Yale, which I believed I had disgraced, was one of the powers behind my throne of torture.

Soon after I reached my room in the sanatorium, the supervisor entered.  Drawing a table close to the bed, he placed upon it a slip of paper which he asked me to sign.  I looked upon this as a trick of the detectives to get a specimen of my handwriting.  I now know that the signing of the slip is a legal requirement, with which every patient is supposed to comply upon entering such an institution—­private in character—­unless he has been committed by some court.  The exact wording of this “voluntary commitment” I do not now recall; but, it was, in substance, an agreement to abide by the rules of the institution—­whatever they were—­and to submit to such restraint as might be deemed necessary.  Had I not felt the weight of the world on my shoulders, I believe my sense of humor would have caused me to laugh outright; for the signing of such an agreement by one so situated was, even to my mind, a farce.  After much coaxing I was induced to go so far as to take the pen in my hand.  There I again hesitated.  The supervisor apparently thought I might write with more ease if the paper were placed on a book.  And so I might, had he selected a book of a different title.  One more likely to arouse suspicions in my mind could not have been found in a search of the Congressional Library.  I had left New York on