I began my strike gently; I knocked off all diet extras, such as the maltine and its accompanying banana or the pudding at the mid-day meal, and kept to the food which would be mine the other side, viz., _Breakfast_: Brown bread, butter, milk. _Mid-day_: Brown bread, potatoes, one vegetable. _Supper_: Brown bread, butter, milk. Both doctors and wardresses talked of the plank bed as one of the hardships likely to be too much for me in the cells, so I took one of the two mattresses from my bed and slept with it on the floor. I clambered up on the furniture and cleaned the windows of my cell to show I could do some extra housemaiding without harm. The first night of my floor-bed I was left undisturbed. The second night, at the time of the “All right?” rounds, the hospital superintendent came in. To my surprise she was not angry, did not scold. She asked quite gently and interestedly why I was lying on the floor. “Because the doctors suggest that I would get ill or die if I laid on a wooden bed instead of an iron one, so I am just showing that I can manage it all right; I am very comfortable, thanks.” But she didn’t go away. The cell, of course, was small, the fixed bedstead down the centre of it taking up most of the floor-room, so I had laid the mattress cross-ways under the bed, my head sticking out on one side, my feet on the other. The wardress suggested that if I woke suddenly in the night I might hit and hurt myself against the bed. I assured her that sleep in Holloway was not of a kind heavy enough to wake from it unconsciously. It was true I had enjoyed such a sleep one night, the first in my private cell, but the ghastly sounds of human desperation and suffering by which it had been broken had driven away sound sleep for the remainder of my imprisonment. At last she went away. The following night she again came and argued about the bed. She said she would worry lest harm should happen while she was responsible for me and it would drive away her own rest. I respected her for at last using a sensible form of argument, but for the moment I did not relent. When she had gone, however, I managed by judicious shifting of the movable furniture to find room for the mattress along the wall with my head behind the door. I rang my bell, the night wardress appeared. Peremptory fashion, I sent her with an invitation to the superintendent to come again if she had not yet gone to bed. The wardress positively laughed at my effrontery, but evidently delivered my message, for in a few minutes my friend the superintendent returned. She tried to look severe, but a broad grin enveloped her face when she saw my new contrivance. “However much I jump about now, I can’t hurt myself. Will you be able to sleep all right?” I asked. She said she would try, and left me.