Unfortunately for me, my good attendant soon left the institution to accept a more attractive business offer.  He left without even a good-bye to me.  Nothing proves more conclusively how important to me would have been his retention than this abrupt leave-taking which the doctor had evidently ordered, thinking perhaps that the prospect of such a change would excite me.  However, I caused no trouble when the substitution was made, though I did dislike having placed over me a man with whom I had previously had misunderstandings.  He was about my own age and it was by no means so easy to take orders from him as it had been to obey his predecessor, who was considerably older than myself.  Then, too, this younger attendant disliked me because of the many disagreeable things I had said to him while we were together in a general ward.  He weighed about one hundred and ninety pounds to my one hundred and thirty, and had evidently been selected to attend me because of his great strength.  A choice based on mental rather than physical considerations would have been wiser.  The superintendent, because of his advanced age and ill health, had been obliged again to place my case in the hands of the assistant physician, and the latter gave this new attendant certain orders.  What I was to be permitted to do, and what not, was carefully specified.  These orders, many of them unreasonable, were carried out to the letter.  For this I cannot justly blame the attendant.  The doctor had deprived him of the right to exercise what judgment he had.

At this period I required but little sleep.  I usually spent part of the night drawing; for it was in September, 1902, while I was at the height of my wave of self-centred confidence, that I decided that I was destined to become a writer of books—­or at least of one book; and now I thought I might as well be an artist, too, and illustrate my own works.  In school I had never cared for drawing; nor at college either.  But now my awakened artistic impulse was irresistible.  My first self-imposed lesson was a free-hand copy of an illustration on a cover of Life.  Considering the circumstances, that first drawing was creditable, though I cannot now prove the assertion; for inconsiderate attendants destroyed it, with many more of my drawings and manuscripts.  From the very moment I completed that first drawing, honors were divided between my literary and artistic impulses; and a letter which, in due time, I felt impelled to write to the Governor of the State, incorporated art with literature.  I wrote and read several hours a day and I spent as many more in drawing.  But the assistant physician, instead of making it easy for me to rid myself of an excess of energy along literary and artistic lines, balked me at every turn, and seemed to delight in displaying as little interest as possible in my newly awakened ambitions.  When everything should have been done to calm my abnormally active mind, a studied indifference and failure to protect my interests kept me in a state of exasperation.