For some time we were kept busy watching the peddler; even his shoes had to be taken from under his bed as he tried to knock the heels into his skull.
Much to my dismay, I was put to sleep near his bed. Half a dozen times he tried to strangle himself, and on the morning of his release, while I was asleep with my back to him, he jumped on my bed like a cat, and with his two powerful hands tried to choke me to death. Convicts came to my rescue; and when he was asked the reason for his attempt on my life, he calmly declared that it was because I had signed the warrant for his death at nine o'clock in the morning.
When we took him downstairs later, he refused to change his striped suit for his street clothes, and shouted that he had made up his mind to die in the "cooler" at nine o'clock. His wife had to be brought over from the 54th Street side, and she induced him to dress and go home.
A religious maniac was put under our care a week before his release. His particular delusion was that he was preaching in the desert. When a keeper approached to silence him, he lifted his right arm and, with eyes popping out of their sockets and a terrified look on his face, he shouted in a stentorian voice: "Vade retro satanas!" ("Get thee behind me, Satan!") "I say, for it is written, thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve!"
In his sane moments he was silent and morose; and when told about his strange behaviour, he answered that he knew by the sudden rising of heat to his head when a fit was coming.
His religious sermons, which kept us awake several hours in the night, were interrupted by excursions under beds and tables, while he barked like a dog at any one who tried to stop him. He was then impersonating the champion bulldog, Rodney Stone.
Another addition to our collection of the insane was a giant negro; but fortunately the expression of his derangement was only before meals, when he knelt at the table, saying grace, but refusing all food.
Even Matteawan sent us a man who was supposed to be cured. He was a muscular, low-browed German sailor who spoke bad, ungrammatical German and worse English. An accident to his leg brought him upstairs, and when the doctor undressed him we saw that his whole body was covered with blue and red tattoos, primitive and childish drawings of nude figures, which reminded me of some of Matisse's masterpieces.