d later in the day the supervisor--who
proved himself a friend on many occasions--took the book to
headquarters.

The assistant physician, who had mistaken my malevolent tongue for a
violent mind, had placed me in an exile which precluded my attending
the service which was held in the chapel that Sunday afternoon. Time
which might better have been spent in church I therefore spent in
perfecting a somewhat ingenious scheme for getting in touch with the
steward. That evening, when the doctor again appeared, I approached him
in a friendly way and politely repeated my request. He again refused to
grant it. With an air of resignation I said, "Well, as it seems useless
to argue the point with you and as the notes sent to others have thus
far been ignored, I should like, with your kind permission, to kick a
hole in your damned old building and to-morrow present myself to the
steward in his office."

"Kick away!" he said with a sneer. He then entered an adjoining ward,
where he remained for about ten minutes.

If you will draw in your mind, or on paper, a letter "L," and let the
vertical part represent a room forty feet in length, and the horizontal
part one of twenty, and if you will then picture me as standing in a
doorway at the intersection of these two lines--the door to the dining
room--and the doctor behind another door at the top of the
perpendicular, forty feet away, you will have represented graphically
the opposing armies just prior to the first real assault in what proved
to be a siege of seven weeks.

The moment the doctor re-entered the ward, as he had to do to return to
the office, I disappeared through my door--into the dining room. I then
walked the length of that room and picked up one of the heavy wooden
chairs, selected for my purpose while the doctor and his tame charges
were at church. Using the chair as a battering-ram, without malice--joy
being in my heart--I deliberately thrust two of its legs through an
upper and a lower pane of a four-paned plate glass window. The only
miscalculation I made was in failing to place myself directly in front
of that window, and at a proper distance, so that I might have broken
every one of the four panes. This was a source of regret to me, for I
was always loath to leave a well-thought-out piece of work unfinished.

The crash of shattered and falling glass startled every one but me.
Especially did it frighten one patient who happened to be in the dining
room at the