Thayer was cutting across the College Green in the long-edged sunlight after the game when he saw James Richardson, Dartmouth’s Professor of Law and Political Science, walking just ahead of him. Jim Richardson was Class of 1900, twenty years after Thayer, but the two men often met at alumni gatherings. As the judge drew abreast of the professor he nodded and they continued together toward the Inn. “Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day?” Thayer asked affably, by way of conversation. He did not notice the shocked look on the other’s face as he continued, “I guess that will hold them for a while. Let them go to the Supreme Court now and see what they can get out of them!” * * * * * The denial of the supplementary motions was no more than Sacco had expected, but the decision left Vanzetti sunk in discouragement. “While hope is still alive in me,” he wrote, “disperation is growing powerful.” His fantasies of violence expanded: _My native me is drearing for what it is becoming. I have cut down trees with a sense of sympathy for them, and almost a sort of remorse; while now thinking of my axe, a lust seizes me to get a mad delight and exaltation by using them on the necks of the men’s eaters; on the necks of those who seem to have the evil in their head and on the trunks of those who seem to have the evil in their breast._ In the weeks before Christmas his mental balance began to waver. He told the guards of having feelings in his head and chest that meant earthquakes were coming. He noticed a sensation of electricity in the air. Each night he barricaded the door of his cell with a table for fear that his enemies might overpower the guards and kill him. The day before Christmas he threatened another prisoner who, he said, was laughing at him. Six days later he smashed a chair. Joseph McLaughlin, the prison physician, and Charles Sullivan, the state expert for insane criminals, spent some time questioning him. He told them that everyone had forsaken him; that at his trial “perjurers, fascists and others” had been “out to get him,” and that he needed to carry a gun for protection. The doctors diagnosed him as in a dangerous hallucinatory and delusional state of mind, and recommended his committal to the Bridgewater Hospital, where Sacco had been sent twenty-one months before. Vanzetti arrived manacled the day after New Year’s. When the admitting doctor asked him routinely why he was there, he replied, “I don’t know, I am not crazy. Perhaps they think I need a rest.” Although for the next two months he seemed a model prisoner, quiet and controlled, his inner turbulence persisted. He told the doctors of a fascist plot against him being prepared through certain Italian prisoners in Charlestown who could kill him “any time any day they want to.” Even in Bridgewater there were such fascists. “I more than feel it,” he told the doctor.