satisfaction of tongue-lashing my oppressors, for I was practically
speechless.

My attendants, like most others in such institutions, were incapable of
understanding the operations of my mind, and what they could not
understand they would seldom tolerate. Yet they were not entirely to
blame. They were simply carrying out to the letter orders received from
the doctors.

To ask a patient in my condition to take a little medicated sugar
seemed reasonable. But from my point of view my refusal was
justifiable. That innocuous sugar disc to me seemed saturated with the
blood of loved ones; and so much as to touch it was to shed their
blood--perhaps on the very scaffold on which I was destined to die. For
myself I cared little. I was anxious to die, and eagerly would I have
taken the sugar disc had I had any reason to believe that it was deadly
poison. The sooner I could die and be forgotten, the better for all
with whom I had ever come in contact. To continue to live was simply to
be the treacherous tool of unscrupulous detectives, eager to
exterminate my innocent relatives and friends, if so their fame could
be made secure in the annals of their craft.

But the thoughts associated with the taking of the medicine were seldom
twice alike. If before taking it something happened to remind me of
mother, father, some other relative, or a friend, I imagined that
compliance would compromise, if not eventually destroy, that particular
person. Who would not resist when meek acceptance would be a confession
which would doom his own mother or father to prison, or ignominy, or
death? It was for this that I was reviled, for this, subjected to cruel
restraint.