My imprisonment pleased me.  I was where I most wished to be, and I busied myself investigating conditions and making mental notes.  As the assistant physician could grant favors to the attendants, and had authority to discharge them, they did his bidding and continued to refuse most of my requests.  In spite of their unfriendly attitude, however, I did manage to persuade the supervisor, a kindly man, well along in years, to deliver a note to the steward.  In it I asked him to come at once, as I wished to talk with him.  The steward, whom I looked upon as a friend, returned no answer and made no visit.  I supposed he, too, had purposely ignored me.  As I learned afterwards, both he and the superintendent were absent, else perhaps I should have been treated in a less high-handed manner by the assistant physician, who was not absent.

The next morning, after a renewal of my request and a repeated refusal, I asked the doctor to send me the “Book of Psalms” which I had left in my former room.  With this request he complied, believing, perhaps, that some religion would at least do me no harm.  I probably read my favorite psalm, the 45th; but most of my time I spent writing, on the flyleaves, psalms of my own.  And if the value of a psalm is to be measured by the intensity of feeling portrayed, my compositions of that day rightly belonged beside the writings of David.  My psalms were indited to those in authority at the hospital, and later in the day the supervisor—­who proved himself a friend on many occasions—­took the book to headquarters.

The assistant physician, who had mistaken my malevolent tongue for a violent mind, had placed me in an exile which precluded my attending the service which was held in the chapel that Sunday afternoon.  Time which might better have been spent in church I therefore spent in perfecting a somewhat ingenious scheme for getting in touch with the steward.  That evening, when the doctor again appeared, I approached him in a friendly way and politely repeated my request.  He again refused to grant it.  With an air of resignation I said, “Well, as it seems useless to argue the point with you and as the notes sent to others have thus far been ignored, I should like, with your kind permission, to kick a hole in your damned old building and to-morrow present myself to the steward in his office.”

“Kick away!” he said with a sneer.  He then entered an adjoining ward, where he remained for about ten minutes.

If you will draw in your mind, or on paper, a letter “L,” and let the vertical part represent a room forty feet in length, and the horizontal part one of twenty, and if you will then picture me as standing in a doorway at the intersection of these two lines—­the door to the dining room—­and the doctor behind another door at the top of the perpendicular, forty feet away, you will have represented graphically the opposing armies just prior to the first real assault in what proved to be a siege of seven weeks.