rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he introduced himself and his
friend. I do not know what became of this friend, or where or how he
eliminated himself; but we two others were inseparable from that moment.
He was a young lawyer from New York, and when I came back from Italy,
four or five years later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with a
never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In whatever world he
happens now to be, I should like to send him my greetings, and confess to
him that my art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense, and
nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as that outcry of his over
the hotel register in Montreal. We were comrades for four or five rich
days, and shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the monuments of
those ancient Canadian capitals, which I think we valued at all their
picturesque worth. We made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and
made giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of love with all the
pretty faces and dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literature
and literary people. He had more acquaintance with the one, and more
passion for the other, but he could tell me of Pfaff's lager-beer cellar
on Broadway, where the Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemians
met; and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit it as soon
as I reached New York, in spite of the tobacco and beer (which I was
given to understand were de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had
known them, were apt to make me sick.

I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who returned to
Montreal on his way to New York, while I remained in Quebec to continue
later on mine to New England. When I came in from seeing him off in a
calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard Taylor in the reading-room, where
he sat sunken in what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not know me,
or even notice me, though I made several errands in and out of the
reading-room in the vain hope that he might do so: doubly vain, for I am