been a scandal and a reproach to the town. Not for their
literature, or for their wit, or for their hard drinking, or even for
their poverty; but for their brotherhood, and for their calm
indifference to all the rest of the world whom they did not care to
receive into their kingdom of Bohemia. There is human nature in this;
more human nature than there is in most provincialism. Take a community
of one hundred people and let any ten of its members join themselves
together and dictate the terms on which an eleventh may be admitted to
their band. The whole remaining eighty-nine will quarrel for the twelfth
place. But take a community of a thousand, and let ten such internal
groups be formed, and every group will have to canvass more or less hard
to increase its number. For the other nine hundred people, being able to
pick and choose, are likely to feel a deep indifference to the question
of joining any segregation at all. If group No. 2 says, "Come into my
crowd, I understand they don't want you in No. 1," the individual
replies: "What the deuce do I care about No. 1 or you either? Here are
Nos. 4, 5, 6, and 7 all begging for me. If you and No. 1 keep on in your
conceit you'll find yourselves left out in the cold."

And as it frequently happens to turn out that way, the dweller in a
great city soon learns, in the first place, that he is less important
than he thought he was; in the second place, that he is less unimportant
than some people would like to have him think himself. All of which goes
to show that when New Yorkers looked with easy tolerance, and some of
them with open admiration, upon the Bohemians at Pfaff's saloon, they
had come to be citizens of no mean city, and were making metropolitan
growth.

[Illustration]

A Bohemian may be defined as the only kind of gentleman permanently in
temporary difficulties who is neither a sponge nor a cheat. He is a type
that has existed in all ages and always will exist. He is a man who
lacks certain elements necessary to success in this world, and who
manages to keep fairly even with the world, by dint of ingenious shift
and expedient; never fully succeeding, never wholly failing. He is a
man, in fact, who can't swim, but can tread water. But he never, never,
never calls himself a Bohemian--at least, in a somewhat wide experience,
I have known only two that ever did, and one of these was a baronet. As
a rule, if you overhear a man approach his acquaintance with the
formul