The hardness of the bed and the coldness of the room were not all that interfered with sleep.  The short corridor in which I was placed was known as the “Bull Pen”—­a phrase eschewed by the doctors.  It was usually in an uproar, especially during the dark hours of the early morning.  Patients in a state of excitement may sleep during the first hours of the night, but seldom all night; and even should one have the capacity to do so, his companions in durance would wake him with a shout or a song or a curse or the kicking of a door.  A noisy and chaotic medley frequently continued without interruption for hours at a time.  Noise, unearthly noise, was the poetic license allowed the occupants of these cells.  I spent several days and nights in one or another of them, and I question whether I averaged more than two or three hours’ sleep a night during that time.  Seldom did the regular attendants pay any attention to the noise, though even they must at times have been disturbed by it.  In fact the only person likely to attempt to stop it was the night watch, who, when he did enter a cell for that purpose, almost invariably kicked or choked the noisy patient into a state of temporary quiet.  I noted this and scented trouble.

Drawing and writing materials having been again taken from me, I cast about for some new occupation.  I found one in the problem of warmth.  Though I gave repeated expression to the benumbed messages of my tortured nerves, the doctor refused to return my clothes.  For a semblance of warmth I was forced to depend upon ordinary undergarments and an extraordinary imagination.  The heavy felt druggets were about as plastic as blotting paper and I derived little comfort from them until I hit upon the idea of rending them into strips.  These strips I would weave into a crude Rip Van Winkle kind of suit; and so intricate was the warp and woof that on several occasions an attendant had to cut me out of these sartorial improvisations.  At first, until I acquired the destructive knack, the tearing of one drugget into strips was a task of four or five hours.  But in time I became so proficient that I could completely destroy more than one of these six-by-eight-foot druggets in a single night.  During the following weeks of my close confinement I destroyed at least twenty of them, each worth, as I found out later, about four dollars; and I confess I found a peculiar satisfaction in the destruction of property belonging to a State which had deprived me of all my effects except underclothes.  But my destructiveness was due to a variety of causes.  It was occasioned primarily by a “pressure of activity,” for which the tearing of druggets served as a vent.  I was in a state of mind aptly described in a letter written during my first month of elation, in which I said, “I’m as busy as a nest of ants.”