Though the habit of tearing druggets was the outgrowth of an abnormal impulse, the habit itself lasted longer than it could have done had I not, for so long a time, been deprived of suitable clothes and been held a prisoner in cold cells.  But another motive soon asserted itself.  Being deprived of all the luxuries of life and most of the necessities, my mother wit, always conspiring with a wild imagination for something to occupy my tune, led me at last to invade the field of invention.  With appropriate contrariety, an unfamiliar and hitherto almost detested line of investigation now attracted me.  Abstruse mathematical problems which had defied solution for centuries began to appear easy.  To defy the State and its puny representatives had become mere child’s play.  So I forthwith decided to overcome no less a force than gravity itself.

My conquering imagination soon tricked me into believing that I could lift myself by my boot-straps—­or rather that I could do so when my laboratory should contain footgear that lent itself to the experiment.  But what of the strips of felt torn from the druggets?  Why, these I used as the straps of my missing boots; and having no boots to stand in, I used my bed as boots.  I reasoned that for my scientific purpose a man in bed was as favorably situated as a man in boots.  Therefore, attaching a sufficient number of my felt strips to the head and foot of the bed (which happened not to be screwed to the floor), and, in turn, attaching the free ends to the transom and the window guard, I found the problem very simple.  For I next joined these cloth cables in such manner that by pulling downward I effected a readjustment of stress and strain, and my bed, with me in it, was soon dangling in space.  My sensations at this momentous instant must have been much like those which thrilled Newton when he solved one of the riddles of the universe.  Indeed, they must have been more intense, for Newton, knowing, had his doubts; I, not knowing, had no doubts at all.  So epoch-making did this discovery appear to me that I noted the exact position of the bed so that a wondering posterity might ever afterward view and revere the exact spot on the earth’s surface whence one of man’s greatest thoughts had winged its way to immortality.

For weeks I believed I had uncovered a mechanical principle which would enable man to defy gravity.  And I talked freely and confidently about it.  That is, I proclaimed the impending results.  The intermediate steps in the solution of my problem I ignored, for good reasons.  A blind man may harness a horse.  So long as the horse is harnessed, one need not know the office of each strap and buckle.  Gravity was harnessed—­that was all.  Meanwhile I felt sure that another sublime moment of inspiration would intervene and clear the atmosphere, thus rendering flight of the body as easy as a flight of imagination.

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