ve way to cathedrals; the city itself was to become
a paradise of mansions. Yale University was to be transformed into the
most magnificent--yet efficient--seat of learning in the world. For
once, college professors were to be paid adequate salaries, and
alluring provision for their declining years was to be made. New Haven
should become a very hotbed of culture. Art galleries, libraries,
museums and theatres of a dreamlike splendor were to rise whenever and
wherever I should will. Why absurd? Was it not I who would defray the
cost? The famous buildings of the Old World were to be reproduced, if,
indeed, the originals could not be purchased, brought to this country
and reassembled. Not far from New Haven there is a sandy plain, once
the bed of the Connecticut River, but now a kind of miniature desert. I
often smile as I pass it on the train; for it was here, for the
edification of those who might never be able to visit the Valley of the
Nile, that I planned to erect a pyramid that should out-Cheops the
original. My harnessed gravity, I believed, would not only enable me to
overcome existing mechanical difficulties, but it would make the
quarrying of immense monoliths as easy as the slicing of bread, and the
placing of them in position as easy as the laying of bricks.

After all, delusions of grandeur are the most entertaining of toys. The
assortment which my imagination provided was a comprehensive one. I had
tossed aside the blocks of childhood days. Instead of laboriously
piling small squares of wood one upon another in an endeavor to build
the tiny semblance of a house, I now, in this second childhood of mine,
projected against thin air phantom edifices planned and completed in
the twinkling of an eye. To be sure, such houses of cards almost
immediately superseded one another, but the vanishing of one could not
disturb a mind that had ever another interesting bauble to take its
place. And therein lies part of the secret of the happiness peculiar to
that stage of elation which is distinguished by delusions of
grandeur--always provided that he who is possessed by them be not
subjected to privation and abuse. The sane man who can prove that he is
rich in material wealth is not nearly so happy as the mentally
disordered man whose delusions trick him into believing himself a
modern Croesus. A wealth of Midaslike delusions is no burden. Such a
fortune, though a misfortune in itself, bathes the world in a golden
glow. No cl