breakdown.

Shortly after going to New York to live, I had explored the Eden Musee.
One of the most gruesome of the spectacles which I had seen in its
famed Chamber of Horrors was a representation of a gorilla, holding in
its arms the gory body of a woman. It was that impression which now
revived in my mind. But by a process strictly in accordance with
Darwin's theory, the Eden Musee gorilla had become a man--in appearance
not unlike the beast that had inspired my distorted thought. This man
held a bloody dagger which he repeatedly plunged into the woman's
breast. The apparition did not terrify me at all. In fact I found it
interesting, for I looked upon it as a contrivance of the detectives.
Its purpose I could not divine, but this fact did not trouble me, as I
reasoned that no additional criminal charges could make my situation
worse than it already was.

For a month or two, "false voices" continued to annoy me. And if there
is a hell conducted on the principles of my temporary hell, gossippers
will one day wish they had attended strictly to their own business.
This is not a confession. I am no gossipper, though I cannot deny that
I have occasionally gossipped--a little. And this was my punishment:
persons in an adjoining room seemed to be repeating the very same
things which I had said of others on these communicative occasions. I
supposed that those whom I had talked about had in some way found me
out, and intended now to take their revenge.

My sense of smell, too, became normal; but my sense of taste was slow
in recovering. At each meal, poison was still the _piece de
resistance_, and it was not surprising that I sometimes dallied one,
two, or three hours over a meal, and often ended by not eating it at
all.

There was, however, another reason for my frequent refusal to take
food, in my belief that the detectives had resorted to a more subtle
method of detection. They now intended by each article of food to
suggest a certain idea, and I was expected to recognize the idea thus
suggested. Conviction or acquittal depended upon my correct
interpretation of their symbols, and my interpretation was to be
signified by my eating, or not eating, the several kinds of food placed
before me. To have eaten a burnt crust of bread would have been a
confession of arson. Why? Simply because the charred crust suggested
fire; and, as bread is the staff of life, would it not be an inevitable
deduction that life had been destroy