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
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