nd those in charge of
the vessel seemed powerless to close it. Every now and then I could
hear parts of the ship give way under the strain. I could hear the air
hiss and whistle spitefully under the resistless impact of the invading
waters; I could hear the crashing of timbers as partitions were
wrecked; and as the water rushed in at one place I could see, at
another, scores of helpless passengers swept overboard into the sea--my
unintended victims. I believed that I, too, might at any moment be
swept away. That I was not thrown into the sea by vengeful
fellow-passengers was, I thought, due to their desire to keep me alive
until, if possible, land should be reached, when a more painful death
could be inflicted upon me.

While aboard my phantom ship I managed in some way to establish an
electric railway system; and the trolley cars which passed the hospital
were soon running along the deck of my ocean liner, carrying passengers
from the places of peril to what seemed places of comparative safety at
the bow. Every time I heard a car pass the hospital, one of mine went
clanging along the ship's deck.

My feverish imaginings were no less remarkable than the external
stimuli which excited them. As I have since ascertained, there were
just outside my room an elevator and near it a speaking-tube. Whenever
the speaking-tube was used from another part of the building, the
summoning whistle conveyed to my mind the idea of the exhaustion of air
in a ship-compartment, and the opening and shutting of the elevator
door completed the illusion of a ship fast going to pieces. But the
ship my mind was on never reached any shore, nor did she sink. Like a
mirage she vanished, and again I found myself safe in my bed at the
hospital. "Safe," did I say? Scarcely that--for deliverance from one
impending disaster simply meant immediate precipitation into another.

My delirium gradually subsided, and four or five days after the 23d the
doctors were able to set my broken bones. The operation suggested new
delusions. Shortly before the adjustment of the plaster casts, my legs,
for obvious reasons, were shaved from shin to calf. This unusual
tonsorial operation I read for a sign of degradation--associating it
with what I had heard of the treatment of murderers and with similar
customs in barbarous countries. It was about this time also that strips
of court-plaster, in the form of a cross, were placed on my forehead,
which had been slightly scrat