s great strength. A choice based on mental rather than
physical considerations would have been wiser. The superintendent,
because of his advanced age and ill health, had been obliged again to
place my case in the hands of the assistant physician, and the latter
gave this new attendant certain orders. What I was to be permitted to
do, and what not, was carefully specified. These orders, many of them
unreasonable, were carried out to the letter. For this I cannot justly
blame the attendant. The doctor had deprived him of the right to
exercise what judgment he had.

At this period I required but little sleep. I usually spent part of the
night drawing; for it was in September, 1902, while I was at the height
of my wave of self-centred confidence, that I decided that I was
destined to become a writer of books--or at least of one book; and now
I thought I might as well be an artist, too, and illustrate my own
works. In school I had never cared for drawing; nor at college either.
But now my awakened artistic impulse was irresistible. My first
self-imposed lesson was a free-hand copy of an illustration on a cover
of _Life_. Considering the circumstances, that first drawing was
creditable, though I cannot now prove the assertion; for inconsiderate
attendants destroyed it, with many more of my drawings and manuscripts.
From the very moment I completed that first drawing, honors were
divided between my literary and artistic impulses; and a letter which,
in due time, I felt impelled to write to the Governor of the State,
incorporated art with literature. I wrote and read several hours a day
and I spent as many more in drawing. But the assistant physician,
instead of making it easy for me to rid myself of an excess of energy
along literary and artistic lines, balked me at every turn, and seemed
to delight in displaying as little interest as possible in my newly
awakened ambitions. When everything should have been done to calm my
abnormally active mind, a studied indifference and failure to protect
my interests kept me in a state of exasperation.

But circumstances now arose which brought about the untimely
stifling--I might better say strangulation--of my artistic impulses.
The doctors were led--unwisely, I believe--to decide that absolute
seclusion was the only thing that would calm my over-active brain. In
consequence, all writing and drawing materials and all books were taken
from me. And from October 18th until the first of the