In the adjoining cell lived a strange character—­a man who was doing sixty days for eating swill out of Barnum’s swill-barrel, or at least that was the way he put it.  He was a badly addled creature, and, at first, very mild and gentle.  The facts of his case were as he had stated them.  He had strayed out to the circus ground, and, being hungry, had made his way to the barrel that contained the refuse from the table of the circus people.  “And it was good bread,” he often assured me; “and the meat was out of sight.”  A policeman had seen him and arrested him, and there he was.

Once I passed his cell with a piece of stiff thin wire in my hand.  He asked me for it so earnestly that I passed it through the bars to him.  Promptly, and with no tool but his fingers, he broke it into short lengths and twisted them into half a dozen very creditable safety pins.  He sharpened the points on the stone floor.  Thereafter I did quite a trade in safety pins.  I furnished the raw material and peddled the finished product, and he did the work.  As wages, I paid him extra rations of bread, and once in a while a chunk of meat or a piece of soup-bone with some marrow inside.

But his imprisonment told on him, and he grew violent day by day.  The hall-men took delight in teasing him.  They filled his weak brain with stories of a great fortune that had been left him.  It was in order to rob him of it that he had been arrested and sent to jail.  Of course, as he himself knew, there was no law against eating out of a barrel.  Therefore he was wrongly imprisoned.  It was a plot to deprive him of his fortune.

The first I knew of it, I heard the hall-men laughing about the string they had given him.  Next he held a serious conference with me, in which he told me of his millions and the plot to deprive him of them, and in which he appointed me his detective.  I did my best to let him down gently, speaking vaguely of a mistake, and that it was another man with a similar name who was the rightful heir.  I left him quite cooled down; but I couldn’t keep the hall-men away from him, and they continued to string him worse than ever.  In the end, after a most violent scene, he threw me down, revoked my private detectiveship, and went on strike.  My trade in safety pins ceased.  He refused to make any more safety pins, and he peppered me with raw material through the bars of his cell when I passed by.

I could never make it up with him.  The other hall-men told him that I was a detective in the employ of the conspirators.  And in the meantime the hall-men drove him mad with their stringing.  His fictitious wrongs preyed upon his mind, and at last he became a dangerous and homicidal lunatic.  The guards refused to listen to his tale of stolen millions, and he accused them of being in the plot.  One day he threw a pannikin of hot tea over one of them, and then his case was investigated.  The warden talked with him a few minutes through the bars of his cell.  Then he was taken away for examination before the doctors.  He never came back, and I often wonder if he is dead, or if he still gibbers about his millions in some asylum for the insane.