h 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.

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 pri