want my snapping-turtle of the very best. What is certain is
that I went to the office of the Saturday Press in New York with much the
same sort of feeling I had in going to the office of the Atlantic Monthly
in Boston, but I came away with a very different feeling. I had found
there a bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness against
respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly becoming my second
country, I could not join in the scorn thought of her and said of her by
the Bohemians. I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the literary
pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he had experienced in
visiting other shrines; but I found no harm in that, for I knew just how
much to be shocked, and I thought I knew better how to value certain
things of the soul than they. Yet when their chief asked me how I got on
with Hawthorne, and I began to say that he was very shy and I was rather
shy, and the king of Bohemia took his pipe out to break in upon me with
"Oh, a couple of shysters!" and the rest laughed, I was abashed all they
could have wished, and was not restored to myself till one of them said
that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; then I began to hope
again that men who took themselves so seriously as that need not be taken
very seriously by me.

In fact I had heard things almost as desperately cynical in other
newspaper offices before that, and I could not see what was so
distinctively Bohemian in these 'anime prave', these souls so baleful by
their own showing. But apparently Bohemia was not a state that you could
well imagine from one encounter, and since my stay in New York was to be
very short, I lost no time in acquainting myself further with it. That
very night I went to the beer-cellar, once very far up Broadway, where I
was given to know that the Bohemian nights were smoked and quaffed away.
It was said, so far West as Ohio, that the queen of Bohemia sometimes
came to Pfaff's: a young girl of a sprightly gift in letters, whose name
or pseudonym had made itself pretty well known at that day, and whose
fate, pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in the
history of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of her
dog, on a railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysms
of that agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached New
York. But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadow
was cast forward upon Pfaff's