dislike the partnership. It is still something neighborly, brotherly,
fatherly, and so I felt him to be when the benign old man looked on me
and spoke to me.




III.

That night at Pfaff's must have been the last of the Bohemians for me,
and it was the last of New York authorship too, for the time. I do not
know why I should not have imagined trying to see Curtis, whom I knew so
much by heart, and whom I adored, but I may not have had the courage, or
I may have heard that he was out of town; Bryant, I believe, was then out
of the country; but at any rate I did not attempt him either. The
Bohemians were the beginning and the end of the story for me, and to tell
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