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, whose name often figured in the verse and
the epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the 'Saturday Press'. I felt
that as a contributor and at least a brevet Bohemian I ought not to go
home without visiting the 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