"How is it," I said, "that I am not sent back to stir?"
He turned to the ward doctor and asked: "What is this mans condition?"
"Imaginary wrongs," replied the doctor.
That made me angry, and I remarked, sarcastically: "It is curious that when a man tries to make a success at little things he is a dead failure."
"What do you mean?" asked the Superintendent, trying to feel me out for a new delusion.
I pointed to the doctor and said: "Only a few years ago this man was interlocutor in an amateur minstrel troupe. As a barn-stormer he was a failure. Since he has risen to the height of being a mad-house doctor he is a success."
Then I turned to the Commissioner and said: "Do you know what constitutes a cure in this place and in Matteawan?"
"I'd like to know," he replied.
"Well," I said, "when a man stoops to carrying tales on other patients and starts in to work cleaning cuspidors, then, and not till then, he is cured. Everybody knows that, in the eyes of attendants and doctors, the worst delusions in the asylum are wanting to go home, demanding more food, and disliking to do dirty work and bear tales."
I don't know whether my talk with the Commissioner had any effect or not, but a little while after that, when my term expired, I was released. I had been afraid I should not be, for very often a man is kept in the asylum long after his term expires, even though he is no more insane than I was. When the stool-pigeons heard that I was to be released they thought I must have been a rat under cover, and applied every vile name to me.