A Mind That Found Itself

d out so comprehensive and devilishly ingenious and, at times, artistic a Third Degree as I was called upon to bear. And an innate mo

he first four of these eight months was intense. All my senses were still perverted. My sense of sight was the first to right itself-nearly enough, at least, to rob the detectives of their moving picture

in my mind. But by a process strictly in accordance with Darwin's theory, the Eden Musée 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 appariti

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 repeati

ch meal, poison was still the pièce de résistance, and it was not surprising that I someti

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

turies 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

hunger. Coaxing by the attendants was of little avail; force was usually of less. But the threat that liquid nourishment would be administered

d 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 enoug