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I had caught sight of him once on Broadway as I was riding up town in an omnibus. He was standing at the top of the steep flight of steps that led to Herr Pfaff's saloon in the basement. It was probably Flagg's dinner hour. Mrs. Morgan, the landlady in Macdougal Street, a melancholy little soul, was now the only link between me and my kinsman. I had a weekly interview with her. I learned that Mr.
The second table from the door is claimed by Sparrow Grass Cozzens and Fitz-James O'Brien, who have adjourned from Pfaff's beer-cellar near Leonard Street, where, under the Broadway sidewalk, they were quaffing lager and getting up quite an appetite on onions, pretzels, and cheese.
It was intensely hot, but the strain had gone out of the day; the feeling of just bearing up against the heat and getting through the day had gone; they all sat round... which was which?... Miriam met eye after eye how beautiful they all were looking out from faces and meeting hers and her eyes came back unembarrassed to her cup, her solid butterbrot and the sunlit angle of the garden wall and the bit of tree just over Fraulein Pfaff's shoulder.
For the waiters wore the conventional dress of "gentlemen" and the diners were in plain and common clothes. At first the diners were in a bit of a funk, but Pfaff's excellent meats and cool, sparkling wines soon set free in each a scintillant human spirit, and the banquet took on almost an air of gaiety. Finally there came the coffee and the ice-cream in forms, and Martin Briggs rose.
Now she saw them dangling in corners, high up near those mysterious windows unnoticed, looking down on her and Mademoiselle... Fraulein Pfaff's cobwebs. They were hers now, had been hers through cold dark nights.... Mademoiselle was asking her if she knew a most charming English book... "La Premiere Priere de Jessica"? "Oh yes." "Oh, the most beautiful book it would be possible to read."
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.
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.
These were the characteristics of the Bohemians, and Bohemia was wherever two or three of them were gathered together. Bohemia was the atmosphere they carried with them, and whether upon the streets or in Pfaff's cellar they were at home. Pfaff's happening to be a convenient gathering-place, and beer happening to be the popular brew with most of them, they gathered there.
Unhappily, Professor Pfaff's results were quite unknown to me, and I had to get them translated. The coincidences, sure enough, were very noticeable. Just before you came in, I was reviving that old discomfiture. Peak, in glancing over the pages, murmured with a smile: 'Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt! 'Even so! exclaimed Mr.
No doubt he was more valued because he was so offensive in some ways than he would have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains a fact that they celebrated him quite as much as was good for them. He was often at Pfaff's with them, and the night of my visit he was the chief fact of my experience.
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