My feverish imaginings were no less remarkable than the external
stimuli which excited them. As I have since ascertained, there were
just outside my room an elevator and near it a speaking-tube. Whenever
the speaking-tube was used from another part of the building, the
summoning whistle conveyed to my mind the idea of the exhaustion of air
in a ship-compartment, and the opening and shutting of the elevator
door completed the illusion of a ship fast going to pieces. But the
ship my mind was on never reached any shore, nor did she sink. Like a
mirage she vanished, and again I found myself safe in my bed at the
hospital. "Safe," did I say? Scarcely that--for deliverance from one
impending disaster simply meant immediate precipitation into another.

My delirium gradually subsided, and four or five days after the 23d the
doctors were able to set my broken bones. The operation suggested new
delusions. Shortly before the adjustment of the plaster casts, my legs,
for obvious reasons, were shaved from shin to calf. This unusual
tonsorial operation I read for a sign of degradation--associating it
with what I had heard of the treatment of murderers and with similar
customs in barbarous countries. It was about this time also that strips
of court-plaster, in the form of a cross, were placed on my forehead,
which had been slightly scratched in my fall, and this, of course, I
interpreted as a brand of infamy.

Had my health been good, I should at this time have been participating
in the Triennial of my class at Yale. Indeed, I was a member of the
Triennial Committee and though, when I left New York on June 15th, I
had been feeling terribly ill, I had then hoped to take part in the
celebration. The class reunions were held on Tuesday, June 26th--three
days after my collapse. Those familiar with Yale customs know that the
Harvard baseball game is one of the chief events of the commencement