It rarely pays to stop and enter into explanations with bulls when they look “horstile.”  A swift get-away is the thing to do.  It took me some time to learn this; but the finishing touch was put upon me by a bull in New York City.  Ever since that time it has been an automatic process with me to make a run for it when I see a bull reaching for me.  This automatic process has become a mainspring of conduct in me, wound up and ready for instant release.  I shall never get over it.  Should I be eighty years old, hobbling along the street on crutches, and should a policeman suddenly reach out for me, I know I’d drop the crutches and run like a deer.

The finishing touch to my education in bulls was received on a hot summer afternoon in New York City.  It was during a week of scorching weather.  I had got into the habit of throwing my feet in the morning, and of spending the afternoon in the little park that is hard by Newspaper Row and the City Hall.  It was near there that I could buy from pushcart men current books (that had been injured in the making or binding) for a few cents each.  Then, right in the park itself, were little booths where one could buy glorious, ice-cold, sterilized milk and buttermilk at a penny a glass.  Every afternoon I sat on a bench and read, and went on a milk debauch.  I got away with from five to ten glasses each afternoon.  It was dreadfully hot weather.

So here I was, a meek and studious milk-drinking hobo, and behold what I got for it.  One afternoon I arrived at the park, a fresh book-purchase under my arm and a tremendous buttermilk thirst under my shirt.  In the middle of the street, in front of the City Hall, I noticed, as I came along heading for the buttermilk booth, that a crowd had formed.  It was right where I was crossing the street, so I stopped to see the cause of the collection of curious men.  At first I could see nothing.  Then, from the sounds I heard and from a glimpse I caught, I knew that it was a bunch of gamins playing pee-wee.  Now pee-wee is not permitted in the streets of New York.  I didn’t know that, but I learned pretty lively.  I had paused possibly thirty seconds, in which time I had learned the cause of the crowd, when I heard a gamin yell “Bull!” The gamins knew their business.  They ran.  I didn’t.

The crowd broke up immediately and started for the sidewalk on both sides of the street.  I started for the sidewalk on the park-side.  There must have been fifty men, who had been in the original crowd, who were heading in the same direction.  We were loosely strung out.  I noticed the bull, a strapping policeman in a gray suit.  He was coming along the middle of the street, without haste, merely sauntering.  I noticed casually that he changed his course, and was heading obliquely for the same sidewalk that I was heading for directly.  He sauntered along, threading the strung-out crowd, and I noticed that his course and mine would cross each other.  I