was so innocent of wrong-doing that, in spite of my education in bulls and their ways, I apprehended nothing.  I never dreamed that bull was after me.  Out of my respect for the law I was actually all ready to pause the next moment and let him cross in front of me.  The pause came all right, but it was not of my volition; also it was a backward pause.  Without warning, that bull had suddenly launched out at me on the chest with both hands.  At the same moment, verbally, he cast the bar sinister on my genealogy.

All my free American blood boiled.  All my liberty-loving ancestors clamored in me.  “What do you mean?” I demanded.  You see, I wanted an explanation.  And I got it.  Bang!  His club came down on top of my head, and I was reeling backward like a drunken man, the curious faces of the onlookers billowing up and down like the waves of the sea, my precious book falling from under my arm into the dirt, the bull advancing with the club ready for another blow.  And in that dizzy moment I had a vision.  I saw that club descending many times upon my head; I saw myself, bloody and battered and hard-looking, in a police-court; I heard a charge of disorderly conduct, profane language, resisting an officer, and a few other things, read by a clerk; and I saw myself across in Blackwell’s Island.  Oh, I knew the game.  I lost all interest in explanations.  I didn’t stop to pick up my precious, unread book.  I turned and ran.  I was pretty sick, but I ran.  And run I shall, to my dying day, whenever a bull begins to explain with a club.

Why, years after my tramping days, when I was a student in the University of California, one night I went to the circus.  After the show and the concert I lingered on to watch the working of the transportation machinery of a great circus.  The circus was leaving that night.  By a bonfire I came upon a bunch of small boys.  There were about twenty of them, and as they talked with one another I learned that they were going to run away with the circus.  Now the circus-men didn’t want to be bothered with this mess of urchins, and a telephone to police headquarters had “coppered” the play.  A squad of ten policemen had been despatched to the scene to arrest the small boys for violating the nine o’clock curfew ordinance.  The policemen surrounded the bonfire, and crept up close to it in the darkness.  At the signal, they made a rush, each policeman grabbing at the youngsters as he would grab into a basket of squirming eels.

Now I didn’t know anything about the coming of the police; and when I saw the sudden eruption of brass-buttoned, helmeted bulls, each of them reaching with both hands, all the forces and stability of my being were overthrown.  Remained only the automatic process to run.  And I ran.  I didn’t know I was running.  I didn’t know anything.  It was, as I have said, automatic.  There was no reason for me to run.  I was not a hobo.  I was a citizen of that community.  It was my home town.  I was guilty of no wrong-doing.  I was a college man.  I had even got my name in the papers, and I wore good clothes that had never been slept in.  And yet I ran—­blindly, madly, like a startled deer, for over a block.  And when I came to myself, I noted that I was still running.  It required a positive effort of will to stop those legs of mine.