famous place, and witnessing if I could not share the revels of my comrades.  As I neither drank beer nor smoked, my part in the carousal was limited to a German pancake, which I found they had very good at Pfaff’s, and to listening to the whirling words of my commensals, at the long board spread for the Bohemians in a cavernous space under the pavement.  There were writers for the ‘Saturday Press’ and for Vanity Fair (a hopefully comic paper of that day), and some of the artists who drew for the illustrated periodicals.  Nothing of their talk remains with me, but the impression remains that it was not so good talk as I had heard in Boston.  At one moment of the orgy, which went but slowly for an orgy, we were joined by some belated Bohemians whom the others made a great clamor over; I was given to understand they were just recovered from a fearful debauch; their locks were still damp from the wet towels used to restore them, and their eyes were very frenzied.  I was presented to these types, who neither said nor did anything worthy of their awful appearance, but dropped into seats at the table, and ate of the supper with an appetite that seemed poor.  I stayed hoping vainly for worse things till eleven o’clock, and then I rose and took my leave of a literary condition that had distinctly disappointed me.  I do not say that it may not have been wickeder and wittier than I found it; I only report what I saw and heard in Bohemia on my first visit to New York, and I know that my acquaintance with it was not exhaustive.  When I came the next year the Saturday Press was no more, and the editor and his contributors had no longer a common centre.  The best of the young fellows whom I met there confessed, in a pleasant exchange of letters which we had afterwards, that he thought the pose a vain and unprofitable one; and when the Press was revived, after the war, it was without any of the old Bohemian characteristics except that of not paying for material.  It could not last long upon these terms, and again it passed away, and still waits its second palingenesis.

The editor passed away too, not long after, and the thing that he had inspired altogether ceased to be.  He was a man of a certain sardonic power, and used it rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably more apparent than real in the pain it gave.  In my last knowledge of him he was much milder than when I first knew him, and I have the feeling that he too came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone.  He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with a vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call generous.  The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side of the ocean as any man could have.  It was not till long afterwards that his English admirers began to discover him, and to make his countrymen some noisy reproaches for ignoring him; they were wholly