secret societies in the world. I soon became accustomed to
the rather agreeable routine, and had I not been burdened with the
delusions which held me a prisoner of the police, and kept me a
stranger to my old world, I should have been able to enjoy a
comparatively happy existence in spite of all.

This new feeling of comparative contentment had not been brought about
by any marked improvement in health. It was due directly and entirely
to an environment more nearly in tune with my ill-tuned mind. While
surrounded by sane people my mental inferiority had been painfully
apparent to me, as well as to others. Here a feeling of superiority
easily asserted itself, for many of my associates were, to my mind,
vastly inferior to myself. But this stimulus did not affect me at once.
For several weeks I believed the institution to be peopled by
detectives, feigning insanity. The government was still operating the
Third Degree, only on a grander scale. Nevertheless, I did soon come to
the conclusion that the institution was what it purported to be--still
cherishing the idea, however, that certain patients and attaches were
detectives.

For a while after my arrival I again abandoned my new-found reading
habit. But as I became accustomed to my surroundings I grew bolder and
resumed the reading of newspapers and such books as were at hand. There
was a bookcase in the ward, filled with old numbers of standard English
periodicals; among them: _Westminster Review, Edinburgh Review, London
Quarterly_, and _Blackwood's_. There were also copies of _Harper's_ and
_The Atlantic Monthly_, dated a generation or more before my first
reading days. Indeed, some of the reviews were over fifty years old.
But I had to read their heavy contents or go without reading, for I
would not yet ask even for a thing I ardently desired. In the room of
one of the patients were thirty or forty books belonging to him. Time
and again I walked by his door and cast longing glances at those books,
which at first I had not the courage to ask for or to take. But during
the summer, about the time I was getting desperate, I finally managed
to summon enough courage to take them surreptitiously. It was usually
while the owner of these books was attending the daily service in the
chapel that his library became a circulating one.

The contents of the books I read made perhaps a deeper impression on my
memory than most books make on the minds of normal readers. To assure
mys