would bear him harmless through all the consequences of such submission,
and finally raise him to great power and authority. It is no unfrequent
illusion of homicidal maniacs to suppose they are under the influence of
the Evil One, or possessed by a Demon. Murderers have assigned as the
only reason they themselves could give for their crime, that "the Devil
got into them," and urged the deed. But the insane have, perhaps, no
attribute more in common than that of superweening self-esteem. The
maniac who has been removed from a garret sticks straws in his hair and
calls them a crown. So much does inordinate arrogance characterize mental
aberration, that, in the course of my own practice, I have detected, in
that infirmity, the certain symptom of insanity, long before the brain had
made its disease manifest even to the most familiar kindred.

Morbid self-esteem accordingly pervaded the dreadful illusion by which the
man I now speak of was possessed. He was proud to be the protected agent
of the Fallen Angel. And if that self-esteem were artfully appealed to,
he would exult superbly in the evil he held himself ordered to perform, as
if a special prerogative, an official rank and privilege; then, he would
be led on to boast gleefully of thoughts which the most cynical of
criminals in whom intelligence was not ruined would shrink from owning;
then, he would reveal himself in all his deformity with as complacent and
frank a self-glorying as some vain good man displays in parading his
amiable sentiments and his beneficent deeds.

"If," said the superintendent, "this be the patient who has escaped from
me, and if his propensity to homicide has been, in some way, directed
towards the person who has been murdered, I shall not be with him a
quarter of an hour before he will inform me how it happened, and detail
the arts he employed in shifting his crime upon another; all will be told
as minutely as a child tells the tale of some school-boy exploit, in