ll
the truth I did not like the story. I remember that as I sat at that
table under the pavement, in Pfaff's beer-cellar, and listened to the
wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of the dinner with Lowell,
the breakfast with Fields, the supper at the Autocrat's, and felt that I
had fallen very far. In fact it can do no harm at this distance of time
to confess that it seemed to me then, and for a good while afterwards,
that a person who had seen the men and had the things said before him
that I had in Boston, could not keep himself too carefully in cotton; and
this was what I did all the following winter, though of course it was a
secret between me and me. I dare say it was not the worst thing I could
have done, in some respects.

My sojourn in New York could not have been very long, and the rest of it
was mainly given to viewing the monuments of the city from the windows of
omnibuses and the platforms of horse-cars. The world was so simple then
that there were perhaps only a half-dozen cities that had horse-cars in
them, and I travelled in those conveyances at New York with an unfaded
zest, even after my journeys back and forth between Boston and Cambridge.
I have not the least notion where I went or what I saw, but I suppose
that it was up and down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying open
to the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by the elevated
roads, and that I found them very stately and handsome. Indeed, New York
was really handsomer then than it is now, when it has so many more pieces
of beautiful architecture, for at that day the skyscrapers were not yet,
and there was a fine regularity in the streets that these brute bulks
have robbed of all shapeliness. Dirt and squalor there were a plenty,
but there was infinitely more comfort. The long succession of cross
streets was yet mostly secure from business, after you passed Clinton
Place; commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and
Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind
dwelt unmolested in the brownstone stretches of Fifth Avenue. I tried
hard to imagine them from the acquaintance Mr. Butler's poem had given
me, and from the knowledge the gentle satire of The 'Potiphar Papers' had
spread broadcast through a community shocked by the excesses of our best
society; it was not half so bad then as the best now, probably. But I do
not think I made very much of it, perhaps because most of the peop