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.

But he must have his drink.  Several of them.  Which Laston’s wife poured for him abundantly.

After breakfast I sprawled on the floor ...  I always sprawl on floors instead of sitting in chairs....

Swartzman and Bella Meunier and I talked and talked and talked ... of Poe ... of Baudelaire, of Balzac....

Then Nichi launched forth on a long disquisition on Japanese and Chinese art, and Mrs. Meunier and I gladly remained silent during the whole morning, enchanted by the vistas of beauty which Swartzman’s words opened for us.

“Why,” I thought, “must such a man lack audiences?  If civilisation were in its right mind, he would hold a chair in some great university, and lecture daily to hundreds ... this man is alive.  His fire wakes kindred fire ... why must we leave the business of teaching to the corpse-minded, the dead-hearted? like so many of our professors and teachers!”

I found out afterward that Nichi Swartzman was utterly irresponsible as he was brilliant.

* * * * *

Laston Meunier dug up poor old Fritz Von Hammer, the former Eos pianist—­whose breath was still as fetid as ever ... who still insisted on seizing you by the coat lapel and talking right into your nose—­dug him up from the moving picture house, where he played.