rs were typical attendants of the brute-force type. Acting
on the order of the doctor in charge, one of them stripped me of my
outer garments; and, clad in nothing but underclothes, I was thrust
into a cell.

Few, if any, prisons in this country contain worse holes than this cell
proved to be. It was one of five, situated in a short corridor
adjoining the main ward. It was about six feet wide by ten long and of
a good height. A heavily screened and barred window admitted light and
a negligible quantity of air, for the ventilation scarcely deserved the
name. The walls and floor were bare, and there was no furniture. A
patient confined here must lie on the floor with no substitute for a
bed but one or two felt druggets. Sleeping under such conditions
becomes tolerable after a time, but not until one has become accustomed
to lying on a surface nearly as hard as a stone. Here (as well, indeed,
as in other parts of the ward) for a period of three weeks I was again
forced to breathe and rebreathe air so vitiated that even when I
occupied a larger room in the same ward, doctors and attendants seldom
entered without remarking its quality.

My first meal increased my distaste for my semi-sociological
experiment. For over a month I was kept in a half-starved condition. At
each meal, to be sure, I was given as much food as was served to other
patients, but an average portion was not adequate to the needs of a
patient as active as I was at this time.

Worst of all, winter was approaching and these, my first quarters, were
without heat. As my olfactory nerves soon became uncommunicative, the
breathing of foul air was not a hardship. On the other hand, to be
famished the greater part of the time was a very conscious hardship.
But to be half-frozen, day in and day out for a long period, was
exquisite torture. Of all the suffering I endured, that occasioned by
confinement in cold cells seems to have made the most lasting
impression. Hunger is a local disturbance, but when one is cold, every
nerve in the body registers its call for help. Long before reading a
certain passage of De Quincey's I had decided that cold could cause
greater suffering than hunger; consequently, it was with great
satisfaction that I read the following sentences from his
"Confessions": "O ancient women, daughters of toil and suffering, among
all the hardships and bitter inheritances of flesh that ye are called
upon to face, not one--not even hunger--seems in m