ed--destroyed by fire--and that I
was the destroyer? On one day to eat a given article of food meant
confession. The next day, or the next meal, a refusal to eat it meant
confession. This complication of logic made it doubly difficult for me
to keep from incriminating myself and others.

It can easily be seen that I was between several devils and the deep
sea. To eat or not to eat perplexed me more than the problem conveyed
by a few shorter words perplexed a certain prince, who, had he lived a
few centuries later (out of a book), might have been forced to enter a
kingdom where kings and princes are made and unmade on short notice.
Indeed, he might have lost his principality entirely--or, at least, his
subjects; for, as I later had occasion to observe, the frequency with
which a dethroned reason mounts a throne and rules a world is such that
self-crowned royalty receives but scant homage from the less elated
members of the court.

For several weeks I ate but little. Though the desire for food was not
wanting, my mind (that dog-in-the-manger) refused to let me satisfy my
hunger. Coaxing by the attendants was of little avail; force was
usually of less. But the threat that liquid nourishment would be
administered through my nostrils sometimes prevailed for the attribute
of shrewdness was not so utterly lost that I could not choose the less
of two evils.

What I looked upon as a gastronomic ruse of the detectives sometimes
overcame my fear of eating. Every Sunday ice cream was served with
dinner. At the beginning of the meal a large pyramid of it would be
placed before me in a saucer several sizes too small. I believed that
it was never to be mine unless I first partook of the more substantial
fare. As I dallied over the meal, that delicious pyramid would
gradually melt, slowly filling the small saucer, which I knew could not
long continue to hold all of its original contents. As the melting of
the ice cream progressed, I became more indifferent to my eventual
fate; and, invariably, before a drop of that precious reward had
dripped from the saucer, I had eaten enough of the dinner to prove my
title to the seductive dessert. Moreover, during its enjoyment, I no
longer cared a whit for charges or convictions of all the crimes in the
calendar. This fact is less trifling than it seems; for it proves the
value of strategy as opposed to brute and sometimes brutal force, of
which I shall presently give some illuminating examples