Each kind of animal behaved according to its nature, during the trip. The steers soon accepted their cramped, moving life rather stolidly. The calves acted as if dumbfounded, in stupefied, wide-eyed innocence ... the sheep huddled as sheep do ... but the big fat porkers were the most intelligent ... like intelligent cowards that fully know their fate, they piled in heaping, screaming, frenzied masses ... in scrambling heaps in the centre of their cars ... suffocating, stinking, struggling closer and closer together and leaving great, bare areas unoccupied on either end.... "A pig has no sense in a car ... or anywhere." "Seems to me they have ... they act as if they know what they're in for, at the other end of the line." "By golly, that's true! I never thought of it that way before!" So conversed the head brakeman and I. My calves soon grew to know me. They bleated, in a friendly manner, as I walked by, overseeing them, when the freight stopped. * * * * * We had bumped along as far as Buffalo. There the stock were driven down an incline into yards fenced in with white-washed boards, for their second rest, required by law,--before launching on the last leg of their journey down the middle of New York State, and along the Hudson ... consigned to Stern and Company of New York.... Some of them were to be butchered there and afford apartment-dwellers lamb stew, tenderloins, and pork chops ... others to be driven aboard cattleboats, for Europe.... * * * * * At Buffalo I was ripe for a change. Also I wished to pick up threads of former experiences and acquaintanceships ... to have a good gossip about the Eos Art Community ... I called up Laston Meunier who had been at Eos and whom I had first met there ... who loved bohemian ways, and welcomed wandering artistic and literary folk at his home in Buffalo. "Where are you now?" Laston asked, over the phone. "I'm calling you from the stockyards," and I told him what I was doing.... "Come on up to my house, and forget your five carloads of calves ... they can weather through the last jump, to New York, alone ... what does it matter?... they're going to be butchered in a few days." Looking about this way and that, to make sure I was unseen, I took my grip in my hand, hopped aboard a street car outside the stockyards, and abandoned my calves to their destiny. Meunier welcomed me. He invited me to stay at his house for several weeks. His pretty, young wife, smiling whimsically, showed me to a room she had already set in dainty order for me. * * * * * Meunier had gone to his office.... Nichi Swartzman, the tall Japanese genius, showed up, and Bella Meunier, Nichi, and I ate breakfast together. Swartzman was, and is, a magnificent talker ... a torch of inspiration burned brightly in his brain, with continual conversational fire.