“If you will keep still a minute, I will,” said Jekyll-Hyde.  I obeyed, and willingly too, for I did not care to suffer more than was necessary.  Instead of loosening the appliance as agreed, this doctor, now livid with rage, drew the cords in such a way that I found myself more securely and cruelly held than before.  This breach of faith threw me into a frenzy.  Though it was because his continued presence served to increase my excitement that Jekyll-Hyde at last withdrew, it will be observed that he did not do so until he had satisfied an unmanly desire which an apparently lurking hatred had engendered.  The attendants soon withdrew and locked me up for the night.

No incidents of my life have ever impressed themselves more indelibly on my memory than those of my first night in a strait-jacket.  Within one hour of the time I was placed in it I was suffering pain as intense as any I ever endured, and before the night had passed it had become almost unbearable.  My right hand was so held that the tip of one of my fingers was all but cut by the nail of another, and soon knifelike pains began to shoot through my right arm as far as the shoulder.  After four or five hours the excess of pain rendered me partially insensible to it.  But for fifteen consecutive hours I remained in that instrument of torture; and not until the twelfth hour, about breakfast time the next morning, did an attendant so much as loosen a cord.

During the first seven or eight hours, excruciating pains racked not only my arms, but half of my body.  Though I cried and moaned, in fact, screamed so loudly that the attendants must have heard me, little attention was paid to me—­possibly because of orders from Mr. Hyde after he had again assumed the role of Doctor Jekyll.  I even begged the attendants to loosen the jacket enough to ease me a little.  This they refused to do, and they even seemed to enjoy being in a position to add their considerable mite to my torture.

Before midnight I really believed that I should be unable to endure the torture and retain my reason.  A peculiar pricking sensation which I now felt in my brain, a sensation exactly like that of June, 1900, led me to believe that I might again be thrown out of touch with the world I had so lately regained.  Realizing the awfulness of that fate, I redoubled my efforts to effect my rescue.  Shortly after midnight I did succeed in gaining the attention of the night watch.  Upon entering my room he found me flat on the floor.  I had fallen from the bed and perforce remained absolutely helpless where I lay.  I could not so much as lift my head.  This, however, was not the fault of the straitjacket.  It was because I could not control the muscles of my neck which that day had been so mauled.  I could scarcely swallow the water the night watch was good enough to give me.  He was not a bad sort; yet even he refused to let out the cords of the strait-jacket.  As he seemed sympathetic, I can attribute his refusal to nothing but strict orders issued by the doctor.