No, I’ll never get over it.  I can’t help it.  When a bull reaches, I run.  Besides, I have an unhappy faculty for getting into jail.  I have been in jail more times since I was a hobo than when I was one.  I start out on a Sunday morning with a young lady on a bicycle ride.  Before we can get outside the city limits we are arrested for passing a pedestrian on the sidewalk.  I resolve to be more careful.  The next time I am on a bicycle it is night-time and my acetylene-gas-lamp is misbehaving.  I cherish the sickly flame carefully, because of the ordinance.  I am in a hurry, but I ride at a snail’s pace so as not to jar out the flickering flame.  I reach the city limits; I am beyond the jurisdiction of the ordinance; and I proceed to scorch to make up for lost time.  And half a mile farther on I am “pinched” by a bull, and the next morning I forfeit my bail in the police court.  The city had treacherously extended its limits into a mile of the country, and I didn’t know, that was all.  I remember my inalienable right of free speech and peaceable assemblage, and I get up on a soap-box to trot out the particular economic bees that buzz in my bonnet, and a bull takes me off that box and leads me to the city prison, and after that I get out on bail.  It’s no use.  In Korea I used to be arrested about every other day.  It was the same thing in Manchuria.  The last time I was in Japan I broke into jail under the pretext of being a Russian spy.  It wasn’t my pretext, but it got me into jail just the same.  There is no hope for me.  I am fated to do the Prisoner-of-Chillon stunt yet.  This is prophecy.

I once hypnotized a bull on Boston Common.  It was past midnight and he had me dead to rights; but before I got done with him he had ponied up a silver quarter and given me the address of an all-night restaurant.  Then there was a bull in Bristol, New Jersey, who caught me and let me go, and heaven knows he had provocation enough to put me in jail.  I hit him the hardest I’ll wager he was ever hit in his life.  It happened this way.  About midnight I nailed a freight out of Philadelphia.  The shacks ditched me.  She was pulling out slowly through the maze of tracks and switches of the freight-yards.  I nailed her again, and again I was ditched.  You see, I had to nail her “outside,” for she was a through freight with every door locked and sealed.

The second time I was ditched the shack gave me a lecture.  He told me I was risking my life, that it was a fast freight and that she went some.  I told him I was used to going some myself, but it was no go.  He said he wouldn’t permit me to commit suicide, and I hit the grit.  But I nailed her a third time, getting in between on the bumpers.  They were the most meagre bumpers I had ever seen—­I do not refer to the real bumpers, the iron bumpers that are connected by the coupling-link and that pound and grind on each other; what I refer to are the beams, like huge cleats, that cross the ends of freight cars just above the bumpers.  When one rides the bumpers, he stands on these cleats, one foot on each, the bumpers between his feet and just beneath.