some business with my attendant’s relatives.  In appearance he reminded me of the uncle to whom this book is dedicated.  I imagined the mysterious caller was impersonating him and, by one of my curious mental processes, I deduced that it was incumbent on me to do for the dumb beast outside what I knew my uncle would have done had he been aware of its plight.  My reputation for decency of feeling I believed to be gone forever; but I could not bear, in this situation, to be unworthy of my uncle, who, among those who knew him, was famous for his kindliness and humanity.

My attendant and his relatives were very kind and very patient, for I was still intractable.  But their efforts to make me comfortable, so far as they had any effect, made keener my desire to kill myself.  I shrank from death; but I preferred to die by my own hand and take the blame for it, rather than to be executed and bring lasting disgrace on my family, friends, and, I may add with truth, on Yale.  For I reasoned that parents throughout the country would withhold their sons from a university which numbered among its graduates such a despicable being.  But from any tragic act I was providentially restrained by the very delusion which gave birth to the desire—­in a way which signally appeared on a later and, to me, a memorable day.

X

I am in a position not unlike that of a man whose obituary notice has appeared prematurely.  Few have ever had a better opportunity than I to test the affection of their relatives and friends.  That mine did their duty and did it willingly is naturally a constant source of satisfaction to me.  Indeed, I believe that this unbroken record of devotion is one of the factors which eventually made it possible for me to take up again my duties in the social and business world, with a comfortable feeling of continuity.  I can, indeed, now view my past in as matter-of-fact a way as do those whose lives have been uniformly uneventful.

As I have seen scores of patients neglected by their relatives—­a neglect which they resent and often brood upon—­my sense of gratitude is the livelier, and especially so because of the difficulty with which friendly intercourse with me was maintained during two of the three years I was ill.  Relatives and friends frequently called to see me.  True, these calls were trying for all concerned.  I spoke to none, not even to my mother and father.  For, though they all appeared about as they used to do, I was able to detect some slight difference in look or gesture or intonation of voice, and this was enough to confirm my belief that they were impersonators, engaged in a conspiracy, not merely to entrap me, but to incriminate those whom they impersonated.  It is not strange, then, that I refused to say anything to them, or to permit them to come near me.  To have kissed the woman who was my mother, but whom I believed to be a federal conspirator, would have been an act of betrayal.  These interviews were much harder for my relatives and friends than for me.  But even for me they were ordeals; and though I suffered less at these moments than my callers, my sum of suffering was greater, for I was constantly anticipating these unwelcome, but eventually beneficial, visitations.