It’s a long tale, with hungry intervals, until I found myself in the pound, at Peru, Illinois, for smashing a fresh brakeman and running up against the constabulary. The police judge of that hustling little Western centre is paid out of the fines that he collects. It is a strange coincidence that when I was searched I had forty-seven, twenty, on my person, and my fine for vagrancy and assault came to forty dollars, with seven-twenty costs. The judge was a hard-shell deacon. Next week, after I crawled out of the underground Pullman, at Louisville, I was watching Senator Burke’s racing stables come in, and I was hungry enough to digest a sand-car. It being work or beg, I says, “Here’s where I break the ethics of my chosen profession and strike for a job.” There was nothing doing until one of the hands mentioned, for a joke, that a waiter was wanted for the dining-room where the nigger jockeys ate. “It is only a matter of sentiment,” said I to myself, “and my Massachusetts ancestors fit and bled and died to make freedmen out of the sons of Ham. Here goes for a feed.” I took the place, collecting a breakfast in advance, and threw chow for three meals at coloured gentlemen who buried it with their knives. “If I am the prodigal son,” says I to myself, “these are the swine, all right.” There was a black exercise-boy in the bunch who played the prize Berkshire hog. He was rather big for a man about the stables. Superstition held that he could lick everything of his weight on earth, and he acted as though he was a front-page feature in the _Police Gazette_. During the fourth meal he got gay over my frank, untrammelled way of passing soup. By way of repartee, I dropped the tray, tucked up my apron, and cleared for action. First, I wiped off one end of the table with him, the way the hired girl handles crumbs. Then I hauled him out into the light of day, so as not to muss the dining-room, and stood him up against the pump, and gave him the Countercheck Quarrelsome. He was long on life and muscle, but short on science, and he swung miles wide. After I’d ducked and countered two attempts, he dropped his head all of a sudden. I saw what was coming. I got out of range and let him butt, and when he came into my zone of fire I gave him the knee good and proper. His face faded into a gaudy ruin.