For a while after my arrival I again abandoned my new-found reading habit.  But as I became accustomed to my surroundings I grew bolder and resumed the reading of newspapers and such books as were at hand.  There was a bookcase in the ward, filled with old numbers of standard English periodicals; among them:  Westminster Review, Edinburgh Review, London Quarterly, and Blackwood’s.  There were also copies of Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly, dated a generation or more before my first reading days.  Indeed, some of the reviews were over fifty years old.  But I had to read their heavy contents or go without reading, for I would not yet ask even for a thing I ardently desired.  In the room of one of the patients were thirty or forty books belonging to him.  Time and again I walked by his door and cast longing glances at those books, which at first I had not the courage to ask for or to take.  But during the summer, about the time I was getting desperate, I finally managed to summon enough courage to take them surreptitiously.  It was usually while the owner of these books was attending the daily service in the chapel that his library became a circulating one.

The contents of the books I read made perhaps a deeper impression on my memory than most books make on the minds of normal readers.  To assure myself of the fact, I have since reread “The Scarlet Letter,” and I recognize it as an old friend.  The first part of the story, however, wherein Hawthorne describes his work as a Custom House official and portrays his literary personality, seems to have made scarcely any impression.  This I attribute to my utter lack of interest at that time in writers and their methods.  I then had no desire to write a book, nor any thought of ever doing so.

Letters I looked upon with suspicion.  I never read them at the time they were received.  I would not even open them; but generally, after a week or sometimes a month, I would secretly open and read them—­forgeries of the detectives.

I still refused to speak, and exhibited physical activity only when the patients were taken out of doors.  For hours I would sit reading books or newspapers, or apparently doing nothing.  But my mind was in an active state and very sensitive.  As the event proved, almost everything done or said within the range of my senses was making indelible impressions, though these at the time were frequently of such a character that I experienced great difficulty in trying to recall incidents which I thought I might find useful at the time of my appearance in court.

My ankles had not regained anything like their former strength.  It hurt to walk.  For months I continued to go flat-footed.  I could not sustain my weight with heels lifted from the floor.  In going downstairs I had to place my insteps on the edge of each step, or go one step at a time, like a child.  Believing that the detectives were pampering me into prime condition, as a butcher fattens a beast for slaughter, I deliberately made myself out much weaker than I really was; and not a little of my inactivity was due to a desire to prolong my fairly comfortable existence, by deferring as long as possible the day of trial and conspicuous disgrace.