. Literary friends and acquaintance : a personal retrospect of American authorship. y rate I did not attempt himeither. The bohemians were the beginning and theend of the story for me, and to tell the truth I did notlike the story. I remember that as I sat at that tableunder the pavement, in Pfaffs beer-cellar, and listenedto the wit that did not seem very funny, I thought ofthe dinner with Lowell, the breakfast with Fields, thesupi)er at the Autocrats, and felt that I had fallen veryfar. In fact it can do no harm at this distance of timeto confess that it seemed to me then, and for a goodwhil
. Literary friends and acquaintance : a personal retrospect of American authorship. y rate I did not attempt himeither. The bohemians were the beginning and theend of the story for me, and to tell the truth I did notlike the story. I remember that as I sat at that tableunder the pavement, in Pfaffs beer-cellar, and listenedto the wit that did not seem very funny, I thought ofthe dinner with Lowell, the breakfast with Fields, thesupi)er at the Autocrats, and felt that I had fallen veryfar. In fact it can do no harm at this distance of timeto confess that it seemed to me then, and for a goodwhile afterwards, that a person who had seen the menand had the things said before him that I had in Boston,could not keep himself too carefully in cotton; and thiswas what I did all the following winter, though ofcourse it was a secret between me and me. I dare sayit was not the worst thing I could have done, in somerespects. My sojourn in New Y^ork could not have been verylong, and the rest of it was mainly given to viewing themonuments of the citv from the windows of omnibuses 76. WILLIAM ALLEN BUTLER MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK and the platforms of horse-cars. The world was sosimple then that there were perhaps only a half-dozencities that had horse-cars in them, and I travelled inthose conveyances at N^ew York with an unfaded zest,even after my journeys hack and forth between Bostonand Cambridge. I have not the least notion where Iwent or what I saw, bnt I suppose that it was up anddown the ugly east and west avenues, then lying opento the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed bythe elevated roads, and that I found them very statelj^and handsome. Indeed, New York was really hand-somer then than it is now, when it has so many morepieces of beautiful architecture, for at that day the sky-scrapers were not yet, and there was a fine regularityin the streets that these brute bulks have robbed of allshapeliness. Dirt and squalor there were a plenty, butthere was in
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