respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly becoming my second
country, I could not join in the scorn thought of her and said of her by
the Bohemians. I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the literary
pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he had experienced in
visiting other shrines; but I found no harm in that, for I knew just how
much to be shocked, and I thought I knew better how to value certain
things of the soul than they. Yet when their chief asked me how I got on
with Hawthorne, and I began to say that he was very shy and I was rather
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