“Now that I have you three brutes where I want you, I’ll tell you a few things you don’t know,” I said.  “You probably think I’ve just tried to kill myself.  It was simply a ruse to make you give me some attention.  When I make threats and tell you that my one object in life is to live long enough to regain my freedom and lay bare the abuses which abound in places like this, you simply laugh at me, don’t you?  But the fact is, that’s my ambition, and if you knew anything at all, you’d know that abuse won’t drive me to suicide.  You can continue to abuse me and deprive me of my rights, and keep me in exile from relatives and friends, but the time will come when I’ll make you sweat for all this.  I’ll put you in prison where you belong.  Or if I fail to do that, I can at least bring about your discharge from this institution.  What’s more, I will.”

The doctor and attendants took my threats with characteristic nonchalance.  Such threats, often enough heard in such places, make little or no impression, for they are seldom made good.  When I made these threats, I really wished to put these men in prison.  To-day I have no such desire, for were they not victims of the same vicious system of treatment to which I was subjected?  In every institution where the discredited principles of “Restraint” are used or tolerated, the very atmosphere is brutalizing.  Place a bludgeon in the hand of any man, with instructions to use it when necessary, and the gentler and more humane methods of persuasion will naturally be forgotten or deliberately abandoned.

Throughout my period of elation, especially the first months of it when I was doing the work of several normal men, I required an increased amount of fuel to generate the abnormal energy my activity demanded.  I had a voracious appetite, and I insisted that the attendant give me the supper he was about to serve when he discovered me in the simulated throes of death.  At first he refused, but finally relented and brought me a cup of tea and some buttered bread.  Because of the severe choking administered earlier in the day it was with difficulty that I swallowed any food.  I had to eat slowly.  The attendant, however, ordered me to hurry, and threatened otherwise to take what little supper I had.  I told him that I thought he would not—­that I was entitled to my supper and intended to eat it with as much comfort as possible.  This nettled him, and by a sudden and unexpected move he managed to take from me all but a crust of bread.  Even that he tried to snatch.  I resisted and the third fight of the day was soon on—­and that within five minutes of the time the doctor had left the ward.  I was seated on the bed.  The attendant, true to his vicious instincts, grasped my throat and choked me with the full power of a hand accustomed to that unmanly work.  His partner, in the meantime, had rendered me helpless by holding me flat on my back while the attacking party choked me into breathless submission.  The first fight of the day was caused by a corn cob; this of the evening by a crust of bread.