planning what I should do with my fortune.  The St. Louis prize was a paltry trifle.  I reasoned that the man who could harness gravity had at his beck and call the world and all that therein is.  This sudden accession of wealth made my vast humanitarian projects seem only the more feasible.  What could be more delightful, I thought, than the furnishing and financing of ideas of a magnitude to stagger humanity.  My condition was one of ecstatic suspense.  Give me my liberty and I would show a sleepy old world what could be done to improve conditions, not only among the insane, but along every line of beneficent endeavor.

The city of my birth was to be made a garden-spot.  All defiling, smoke-begriming factories were to be banished to an innocuous distance.  Churches were to give way to cathedrals; the city itself was to become a paradise of mansions.  Yale University was to be transformed into the most magnificent—­yet efficient—­seat of learning in the world.  For once, college professors were to be paid adequate salaries, and alluring provision for their declining years was to be made.  New Haven should become a very hotbed of culture.  Art galleries, libraries, museums and theatres of a dreamlike splendor were to rise whenever and wherever I should will.  Why absurd?  Was it not I who would defray the cost?  The famous buildings of the Old World were to be reproduced, if, indeed, the originals could not be purchased, brought to this country and reassembled.  Not far from New Haven there is a sandy plain, once the bed of the Connecticut River, but now a kind of miniature desert.  I often smile as I pass it on the train; for it was here, for the edification of those who might never be able to visit the Valley of the Nile, that I planned to erect a pyramid that should out-Cheops the original.  My harnessed gravity, I believed, would not only enable me to overcome existing mechanical difficulties, but it would make the quarrying of immense monoliths as easy as the slicing of bread, and the placing of them in position as easy as the laying of bricks.

After all, delusions of grandeur are the most entertaining of toys.  The assortment which my imagination provided was a comprehensive one.  I had tossed aside the blocks of childhood days.  Instead of laboriously piling small squares of wood one upon another in an endeavor to build the tiny semblance of a house, I now, in this second childhood of mine, projected against thin air phantom edifices planned and completed in the twinkling of an eye.  To be sure, such houses of cards almost immediately superseded one another, but the vanishing of one could not disturb a mind that had ever another interesting bauble to take its place.  And therein lies part of the secret of the happiness peculiar to that stage of elation which is distinguished by delusions of grandeur—­always provided that he who is possessed by them be not subjected to privation and abuse.  The sane man who can prove that he is rich in material wealth is not nearly so