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 destroyed—­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,