II.

It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented New
York literature to my imagination; for I certainly associated other names
with its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for the
Saturday Press myself, and had my pride in it, and perhaps it was because
that paper really embodied the new literary life of the city. It was
clever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. It
attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt and
feared. The young writers throughout the country were ambitious to be
seen in it, and they gave their best to it; they gave literally, for the
Saturday Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying, vaguer even
than promises. It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well
for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic,
and for the time there was no other literary comparison. To be in it was
to be in the company of Fitz James O'Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich,
Mr. Stedman, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveliest in
verse at that day in New York. It was a power, and although it is true
that, as Henry Giles said of it, "Man cannot live by snapping-turtle
alone," the Press was very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then;
I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not like
snapping-turtle so much as I once did, and I have grown nicer in my
taste, and want my snapping-turtle of the very best. What is certain is
that I went to the office of the Saturday Press in New York with much the
same sort of feeling I had in going to the office of the Atlantic Monthly
in Boston, but I came away with a very different feeling. I had found
there a bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness against