A Corner Of Bohemia

( Originally Published 1912 )

THIRTY-FIVE years ago all of us who gathered at Oscar's, opposite the old Academy of Design, in Fourth Avenue, were struggling in literature or art. It was a quiet and decent place, and other customers left us to ourselves. Each of us had his own seat at the round-table, and there we sat good-humouredly, in clouds of the "infinite tobacco," which Carlyle attributed to Tennyson, with much chaff blowing between us, the flapping of the wings of ambitions that began better than they ended, and a sufficiency of reciprocal admiration, saved by ridicule before it could cloy or spoil. We all thought we were doing or going to do surpassing things which would make the world hold its breath. We were boyishly extravagant and inflated, and, as the doors closed on us, Olympian.

For us they closed till the next night. We were never there in the daytime. To us Oscar's was like Thackeray's "Back Kitchen" or his "Haunt," which vanished at the approach of daybreak — the door, the house, the bar, the waiter, Oscar himself, and all. One obligation 'remained, however, and that required one of us to see Jack M home. He was the incorrigible, unescapable dependent of the fraternity, a handsome young poet from Belfast. He could write well enough to be accepted by the Century and Harper's, but he was hopelessly indolent and unconscionable. Perhaps some of his verses linger in the anthologies; the best of them ought not to disappear. Few are left who remember him at all, or, I might say, who remember any of us. Exasperating as he was, a later and smaller Villon, a lesser Burns, another Savage, or a Branwell Bronté, wanton and beyond redemption, we put up with him for his talents and his smile, vowing time and again that we would have no more of him, and then, after a momentary coolness, restoring him to his old footing. We used all our ingenuity and persuasion to keep him at work, which might easily have been done; we got "jobs" for him, commissions for stories, articles, and verse, but it was in vain.

The late W. M. Laffan, a struggler like the rest of us then, not the magnate he became as a colleague of Mr. Morgan and editor of the Sun, succeeded when the rest of us had failed, by a strategem of Hebraic ruthlessness.

He called on him at his dingy lodgings early in the morning, knowing that the sluggard would still be abed.

"I've got a job for you, Jack, and see here! you are not going to leave this room, my boy, till it's finished."

He explained what it was, and, after seeing that pen, paper, and ink were on the table, walked off with the poet's only pair of trousers under his arm. In the evening he came back and, receiving the manuscript, returned the trousers, coercion triumphing when no other form of compulsion would have availed.

I am reminded of a story that used to be told by Richard Watson Gilder. When the old Scribner's Monthly was started, somewhere near Bleecker Street and Broadway, and he was its assistant editor, Frank R. Stockton, not yet celebrated by the "Rudder Grange" stories, had a subordinate place in the same office. They sat, I think, face to face. Gilder had just written some verses on the hardships of the poet's lot, the refrain of which was, " What the poet wants is bread," and with the excusable vanity of youth he turned eagerly to the news-papers every morning to see how often it had been quoted and what had been said of it. He saw Stockton watching him one day in that detached, disinterested, almost lugubrious way of his which might melt into a smile but rarely if ever got as far in levity as laughter. The gravity of the humourist's manner, whether it is deliberate and methodical or temperamental and unconscious, serves his purpose well. It has the effect of the low light which prepares the stage for the effulgence of the transformation scene. Bret Harte often spoiled his stories as he told them in his lectures and conversation by laughing him-self, before his audiences had time to. Stockton could hold himself as an image of conventual austerity during the mirth he communicated to his listeners; in the height of it he sat impassive or with a no more explicit betrayal of emotion than a look of mild surprise. He did not even chuckle or gurgle as Mark Twain did.

Gilder found what he was looking for. There was the poem, and, as I daresay other young poets do as often as their verses turn up, he read it once more. Was it not Samuel Rogers who said that he never met Wordsworth in a friend's library that he was not looking into one of his own works?

Gilder discovered what he thought was a misprint. "What the poet wants is bread" had become "What the poet wants is cheese, at the end of every stanza. He had to laugh and call Stockton's attention to it, but Stockton did not seem to see the fun of it. A closer examination showed that "bread" had been cut out and "cheese," neatly done with a pen in close imitation of the type, gummed in — by the apparently guileless Stockton, of course.

This has nothing to do with "Jack" except that bread alone did not satisfy him, and he would leave us when-ever he could procure cheese elsewhere. He pressed me for a loan late one afternoon when my purse was empty, as it often was in those days.

"You could get it," he said reproachfully, with unlimited assurance and impudence, in answer to my explanation. His need was more than ordinary; he was in the sorest straits; unless he could get some money instantly disaster must crush him, and I would be responsible. There was no doubt about that —I would be the delinquent. He convinced me that I was hard-hearted, and made me ashamed of myself, and at last wheedled my watch out of my pocket and disappeared with it in the direction of the nearest pawnbroker, where I recovered it the next day.

That evening I changed my usual restaurant for another, which was seldom visited by us, and there I discovered the rogue and the reason of his exigency. There he was in the highest spirits, as glossy and vivacious as he could be, with a bleached and bedecked Light o' Love, displaying her charms and giggling, opposite to him, and between them, instead of the rasping vin ordinaire of the place, a bottle of the Amontillado, which I liked but could seldom afford.

Another night Edgar Fawcett and I were parting from him in Union Square, a cold, drizzling night, when the wind whistled round the corners and the pelting rain made us turn up the collars of our overcoats. He was out of sorts and doleful. What was the matter? He paused before a letter box, and drew out of a pocket a bundle of letters ready for the post. They were to his friends at home, he explained, the last letters he would ever write, for he had resolved to take Time by the fore-lock and defy Fate, the Fate that had tortured him all his days, and we might take what comfort we could in the knowledge that in one of them to a relative who would see to it were full particulars of every dollar he owed to us and to others. All should be repaid, and he relieved from the burden of life. Not expecting him to carry out his threat, we chaffed him as we left him, and separated to go home. But the memory of some verses he had written on suicide in the Century, verses of dramatic power, haunted me. I could not eat my dinner, and leaving it unfinished I hurried out into the streets to see Fawcett at the house of his sister, Mrs. de Coppet, in West Seventeenth Street. Fawcett, too, gave up his dinner, and through the storm we made haste to Jack's lodgings. He was not there, and had not been. I pictured him — Jack, with his ready laughter and affectionate ways; Jack of songs and stories; Jack, miraculously transfigured, his faults wiped out, his merits shining — I pictured him dragging down the length of a dark and slippery pier and there escaping all his perplexities by flinging himself into the rushing tide. We searched all his haunts for him. They had not seen him since yesterday, and Fawcett's unbelief yielded slowly to my conviction.

At about nine o'clock, wet and dispirited, we looked into one of the little French restaurants that then clustered in Greene and Bleecker Streets was it the Restaurant du Grand Vatel, magnificent in nothing but its name, or the more modest Taverne. Alsacienne, where the dinner of five courses, vin compris, cost thirty-five cents? There we discovered him, debonair as ever, ending his repast with a pousse-cafe, and reading a soiled copy of " Suicide " to a group of admirers in a corner. Our "pious feelings" had been played on, and we were as mad as the bull in Hardy's story. No sin of the Decalogue is so unforgivable as an advantage taken of one's sensibilities: that somehow pricks our vanity; the noblest part of us is duped and humiliated and turned to gall. When we had expressed our opinion of him he turned a front of sheepish innocence toward us. "You seem to be disappointed — you seem to be in a hurry," he complained. " Wait. If you wait, you'll see."

After a parley we induced him to come with us, and saw him to his lodgings. He lit the flickering gas, and threw himself on the bed. He picked up a razor from the dressing table.

"Do it," said Fawcett in a provocative voice, cruel and callous it seemed to me in my horror, a voice provocative and instigatory. I thought that the taunt must impel the lurking impulse from the shame of its irresolution.

But Jack, like a child, allowed me to take the razor away from him without more than a feint at a struggle, and as I put it safely into my trousers pocket I saw that an anti-climax would end the little drama of the night.

Two days later he slunk into my rooms in Stuyvesant Square and asked for it. Confident then that it would not be misused, I gave it to him for the shave he badly needed.

Sometimes "Charley" Stoddard (Charles Warren Stoddard of the "South Sea Idylls") "dropped" in, perhaps from Egypt or from San Francisco or from the Pacific paradise, one of the gentlest and most plaintive of little men, who was not inaptly described by Mark Twain as "such a nice girl." He had a beseeching, wistful, propitiating manner, shot with gleams of humour that played as the sun plays through clouds. When he smiled at you it was with a mute entreaty for sympathy. Once he appeared in an old ulster, much too big for him, its skirts sweeping the floor; he had borrowed it from Joaquin Miller, "the poet of the Sierras," as he explained, without seeing any reason for our laughter.

"Charley" would take from us anything he wanted, and we could spare, as he took the air, or as a child takes things, as a natural right, without constraint or the awkward protestations of gratitude of the ordinary receiver: a night's, a week's lodging, the freedom of one's table, one's pipes, one's gloves, one's money, but when his ships came home — they were always belated and unlucky restitution never failed, and what was his at once became ours. Oh, those ships of the needy and improvident! How long they were at sea! How seldom they made port ! And when they made port, how shrunk were their freights ! Like the Flying Dutch-man, few of them ever doubled the Cape. They were like the ships of his own poem of "The Cocoa Tree":

Cast on the water by a careless hand,
Day after day the winds persuaded me;
Onward I drifted till a coral tree
Stayed me among its branches, where the sand
Gathered about me, and I slowly grew,
Fed by the constant sun and the inconstant dew.

The sea birds build their nests against my root,
And eye my slender body's horny case;
Widowed within this solitary place,
Into the thankless sea I cast my fruit;
Joyless I thrive, for no man may partake
Of all the store I bear and harvest for his sake.

No more I heed the kisses of the morn;
The harsh winds rob me of the life they gave;
I watch my tattered shadow in the wave
And hourly droop and nod my crest forlorn,
While all my fibres stiffen and grow numb,
Beek'ning the tardy ships, the ships that never come.

"How many are the milestones on which I have sat," he wrote to me, "looking on my last dollar and wondering where the next was to come from!" But he really never worried much: each milestone was a mile nearer to the happy valley; he had the true gypsy, vagabond spirit, which receives without complaint whatever falls, and frets not for more indulgence than an indifferent fate bestows.

One of the most original of American authors; one who could catch the soul of things below their superficial and material aspects; one whose charm inheres in a style and fancy too rarefied to be at once or at all appreciated by the casual, unreflective, uncultivated reader, he will endure in that first little book of the sea and flowers, which as I reread it inclines me to call him the Charles Lamb of the Pacific.

Robert Louis Stevenson was charmed by it and him. He sketched him in "The Wrecker," the queer little man who lived in a shanty on Telegraph Hill, and, missing him one day, he left under Stoddard's door this jingle on a scrap of paper:

O Stoddard! in our hours of ease,
Despondent, dull, and hard to please,
when coins and business wrack the brow,
A most infernal nuisance, thou!

O Stoddard! if to man at all,
To me unveil thy face —
At least to me —
Who at thy club and also in this place
Unwearied have not ceased to call,
Stoddard for thee!

I scatter curses by the row,
I cease from swearing never;
For men may come and men may go,
But Stoddard's out forever.

"South Sea Idylls" gave literature a fresh voice and showed a new capacity in familiar words. It filled the nostrils with the scent of lilies and orange flowers and our ears with the diapason of the sea murmuring along coral reefs.

He was always turning up unexpectedly in unexpected ways. When I was in San Francisco he was the idol of the Bohemian Club; then he went to the Sandwich Islands and remained there so long and was so contented with the simple life he was living, unharassed by cares or ambitions, that I supposed he would never willingly exchange the bread fruit and airy vesture of that perpetual summer-land for the flesh-pots of prosaic civilization. Later he was appointed professor of English Literature at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, the choice having been made on the principle that a teacher who can reveal the soul of a book to his class is better than the man whose only recommendations are syntax and history. His methods were original (his spelling was abominable), but they were no doubt effective, and while the faculty were amply satisfied with his services, he became immensely popular with the students. Then he went to Covington, Kentucky. "I was so used up when I left the college," he wrote to me, "that for some months I felt as if I would never recover, but the loving care of my good friends here, and the unspeakable purity of the Kentucky whiskey, coupled with some weeks of absolute rest and the absence of responsibility, have pulled me through."

His affections reached out as devouringly as the tentacles of an octopus. After our meeting in San Francisco we became correspondents, and though I wrote to him, as I thought, without reserve, and with a warm regard, we had only just begun when he protested that my letters were "too formal."

"What does he expect?" said Saltus (not Edgar, but his half-brother, Frank). "I suppose he thinks you ought to address him as 'Dear old Pard, you mash me. You're a Nineveh brick, and don't you forget it!'

No one was hailed with more gladness in our symposia at Oscar's than Maurice Barrymore, the father of Ethel, Lionel, and John. He would drift in after the play, one of the handsomest fellows in town, well-bred and well-read, captivating in manner, and unspoiled by any of the affectations which cling like paint to so many young actors when they move outside the theatre. In those days he was fastidious as to his attire and not, as he became later, careless of his personal appearance. His mobile and sensitive face was as pallid as that of Edwin Booth, and, like Booth's, his deep and significant eyes gathered intensity in contrast with its ivory whiteness. He had some repose then, and was not the flighty creature he afterward became through burning his candle at both ends and in the middle, all at once.

The leading man at the leading theatres, the ideal jeune premier, he cared little or nothing for his success as an actor. What he always wanted to do was to write plays: that ambition was ever in his mind, ever on his tongue. I have been told that, after his collapse, that tragical collapse of his, when his mind gave way, the passion reasserted itself, and the first thing he did was to beg for pencil and paper and apply himself to the preparation of a drama, the parts in which he assigned to his fellows in misfortune.

Let us draw the curtain over that painful scene and recall him as he was while unbereft: nimble in wit, amiable, courteous, patient under attack, and aglow with enthusiasm. I say, patient under attack: I have seen him bear annoyance as only a strong man can, and shrug his shoulders without other reprisal than a scathing word or two which made the person to whom they applied aware of his own ridiculousness.

Once, when we were talking, one among us persisted in begging the question. He could not keep to it, but muddled it with all sorts of irrelevance. If we spoke of China he spoke of Peru; while we had Euripides in hand he dragged in Andrew Jackson, or somebody else unrelated to the discussion. It was impossible to pin him down or to shut him up. I dare say many people will recognize in him a by no means uncommon kind of bore. Barrymore hit the right definition for him: "The cuttlefish of conversation. It's no use to follow him. If you do he will at once disappear in the cloud of his own exudations."

Once in your company, "Barry," as we called him, would stay, if you could, till dawn or long after dawn, gaining rather than losing brilliance as the hours passed and the world began to shake its chains. Out would come his latest play, not a manuscript, not even notes, but a rush of turbulent ideas not yet committed to paper. With matches, ashes, or the tricklings from a glass he would make a diagram of the stage, and then with his finger indicate the action he proposed. At the beginning his synopsis would be lucid and detailed, and the characters mentioned by name; then as he warmed up he would abbreviate his exposition, giving names no more, and substituting for them only personal pronouns — "He" here, "She" there, while the action would be described by gesticulations and running commentaries, peppered with sulphurous expletives.

"You, see! You see! He comes in here, R. U. E., the d — d — d —! She's standing at a table, centre, arranging flowers. He sneaks toward her. She sees him, and cries 'Ah ! ' Taken by surprise. Horrified, clutches the back of a chair. He seizes her by the wrist and drags her toward him, and whispers in her ear. She drops to the floor, moaning, paralyzed. Paralyzed ! He — the d — d — d ! grinds his teeth and is alarmed. He springs to the doors, locks all of them. Shuts the windows. Pulls down all the shades. Blows out the lamps. You see? Comes back to her. Snarls. He has a knife in his hand, the God-forsaken son of a sea-cook, the hoofed and horned !! ! "

On that, or something like it (the parody is confessed), the curtain would come down, and the breathless Barry would light another cigarette and say, "I am writing that little bit for myself. I see myself in it. I feel myself in it. And Georgie will do the widow."

" Georgic " was his wife, a very clever actress, the sister of John Drew.

While he was with you he was indivisibly yours, and the rest of the world had to wait for him; but when the rest of the world captured him in its turn you became the negligible quantity. His engagements were recorded in air. He meant to keep them, no doubt; he was con-trite when he failed, but his clock stopped, and time had no measurements as he abandoned himself to any society that interested him. So amiable was he, so diverting, so original, that his companions never willingly let him go, and they were as much to blame, if not more, for his delinquencies.

One day I met him in London, and took him to my club for luncheon. We spent the whole afternoon together very happily, and it sped faster than we reckoned. Darkness came before he insisted that he must go, really must. I urged him to stay to dinner, but no, he had an imperative and unescapable engagement.

"At what hour?" I asked.

"At one o'clock," he replied, quite seriously, and it was then close upon seven.

Many of the plays, probably most of them, were never written. They came and went in and out of his mind like shooting stars, dazzling him with their promise, and then eluding him. Plays of that sort can be measured only by their author's belief in them, and that is as good as to say that the plays achieved are inferior to them. They are unchallenged, uncriticized, unexposed to misunderstanding, jealousy, and depreciation. Their incubation is an unalloyed delight, a pleasant dream without the disenchantment of any rude awakening. Nevertheless, Barrymore made one substantial success in his "Nadjesda," the sombre drama in which Modjeska starred the play which he believed inspired Sardou's later "La Tosca." He was vituperative against the wrong that he contended had been done him in that case. He claimed that he had submitted "Nadjesda" to Bernhardt, and that after rejecting his manuscript she had conveyed the essence of it to Sardou, who had used it as the foundation of "La Tosca." In all other things than play-writing he was one of the least vain of men.

You could please him by praising his acting, which often deserved praise and received plenty of it from both the people "in front" and his colleagues. His fellow-players of all degrees were as warm in their regard for him as those who were not in the profession, which can be said of but a few actors. They were always repeating his witticisms and giving examples of his ingenuity in extricating himself from difficulties on the stage, such as losing his "lines" and extemporizing till nothing but the cue was saved. In his time he played many and various parts excellently— Orlando, Maurice de Saxe, and Jim the Penman; scores of them come back to mind, none more vividly than Rawdon Crawley in Mrs. Fiske's memorable adaptation of "Vanity Fair." But could he have chosen his work, all other things would have been abandoned for that consuming ambition which, down to the very end, minimized and superseded all other interests.

When my wife and I invited him to luncheon or dinner, we usually looked for him at any hour but the hour appointed, or, I should say, any hour later than the hour appointed. Whenever he appeared — at three in-stead of one, or at nine instead of seven, though other people's belatedness could not be similarly condoned — he escaped reprimand, and at once imparted to any conversation a fillip, making, as it were, still water effervesce. One afternoon he arrived on the stroke of the clock, surprising' us as much by the spruceness of his attire as by his exceptional punctuality. We had ceased to expect either; long habit had accustomed us to his neglect of both, and confirmed us in patience. Epigrams were easy to him. He was not addicted to long speeches; what he said was crisp and edged with raillery. We talked of books, of pictures, and, be sure, of plays — Shakespeare and the musical glasses. How he found time to read I do not know, but he was a well-read man. The conversation shifted to religion, and an avowal of his led to an exclamation and a question.

"You are not a Roman Catholic, Barry ! "

"Yes, William, I am, but I'm afraid God does not know it ! "

He stayed and stayed, remaining long after the others had gone, and such a rapid change came over him as I had never seen in any human being before and hope never to see again. He became lachrymose, spasmodic, and hysterical. He aged before our eyes as though years were slipping away from him instead of hours. His speech rambled and stumbled, tears filled his eyes, his handsome face became haggard and senile. He pulled himself together and laughed before his departure. But the laughter was constrained, and when the door closed, the door that had been opened for him so gladly, I had a too soon verified presentment that we should not meet him again.

Alas, poor Yorick! Draw the veil on his frailty, for it was far outweighed by kindness and many other merits. In his character and temperament he was not unlike his own favourite of fiction --- Fielding's Tom Jones a sinner, but a very sweet one.

Sometimes we were twenty strong at Oscar's, and among others were Edgar Fawcett, George Parsons Lathrop, William Henry Bishop, H. C. Bunner, Francis S. Saltus, and George Edgar Montgomery, "the poet of the future," as the poor boy liked to be called, "the poet of the middle of next week," as Saltus dubbed him.

How much it takes to make a name, an enduring reputation! When we seem to be on the edge of it we are flicked off like flies by the new generation, which has its own tastes and its own favourites. How good was the work of Bishop, Bunner and Lathrop in criticism, verse, and fiction ! High place and some permanence seemed assured for them. Each had a quality of his own. Each was above the average. Whimsical humour was the strong point of Bishop and Bunner, a humour not dependent on the slang of the streets, as so much of what passes as humour now is. They wrote as educated men for educated people, putting perhaps too great a value on style. So did Lathrop, the son-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, essentially a poet, was compelled against his preferences to be also a handy man of letters, of the kind editors rejoice in. Whatever you gave him to do he did — verse or prose, criticism, fiction, or history -- with sufficient skill and conscientiousness to conceal from the reader the incubus of effort and distaste. His versatility was remarkable, his craftsmanship unimpugnable, and, though often restricted to the ambling gait of hack work, he showed in the breathing spaces of his manumission how good a seat he had on Pegasus.

Ask now at the bookseller's for Lathrop's "Echo of Passion," for Bunner's "Short Sixes" or for Bishop's "Detmold," which Howells thought so much of that he used it serially in the Atlantic. In all probability he will say they are not in stock or that they are out of print, referring you to the chances of the dust in a second-hand shop. Ah, my dear young friend, in whose ears applause is ringing, enjoy it while you may, but put not your faith in Posterity! Posterity will snatch the laurels which tickle your brow, and sponge your name with the biggest and wettest of sponges from the slate, that others may write on it. The grandchildren of the girls who dote on you now will wonder how on earth such dreary old stuff as yours could ever have been popular. t <> Some day I should like to write an article on forgotten authors; there are so many of them on whom neglect has unjustly and inexplicably fallen. Surely you do not think yourself comparable with Theodore Winthrop, Fitzhugh Ludlow, J. W. de Forest, Albert Webster, or Constance Fenimore Woolson? Yet who reads them now? Very few remember even their names. I will write that article and suggest to a publisher a reprint of those discarded masterpieces of the past. If, in the future, a fragment of you is enshrined in that way, it will be all you can expect from Posterity, and her twin sister, Oblivion, will resist even that.

Only one in the set at Oscar's made a commercial success. We liked him, but I am afraid we patronized him. He had been in business in California and was business-like in method and manner, not a dreamer, not an idealist, to whom pelf was less than constancy to art. He was thick in figure, thick-voiced, and pragmatic — on a lower plane than we reckoned ourselves to be. I think we classed him as an outsider; no doubt we were a little priggish and too consciously superior, but he was very amiable and forbearing, and in a degree pathetic. He had written a novel, and was convinced that it was a great novel. The publishers did not agree with him at all; probably no other novel met with more discouragement from them than his did. But rejection after rejection did not shake his steadfast faith in it, and though inwardly from an incomplete knowledge of it, we slighted it, his patience and fortitude under rebuff compelled our admiration. In the end, I think, he published it at his own cost.

His name was Archibald Clavering Gunter, and the novel was "Mr. Barnes of New York." Fifty copies of it, perhaps a hundred, sold to one of any of ours, and it is not out of fashion yet. Gunter and it are not for-gotten. I do not mean to speak of them with disrespect. The public will have what it wants, especially stories of thrills and incessant action. Few of that kind excel "Mr. Barnes" or the other stories of Gunter's, which afterward flowed from him in a stream till they seemed to inundate every bookstall, and even the trains moving across the Continent. Afoot ourselves, we saw him driving down the Avenue in his carriage with liveried servants, as friendly as ever, and, for all that display, ostensibly as simple as ever; and while we may have murmured at the inscrutability of the public taste we did not forsake the composure and little refinements of the quiet way.

Though lacking gold we never stooped
To pick it up in all our days;
Though lacking praise, we sometimes drooped,
We never asked a soul for praise.'

I have said that we were not to be found at Oscar's in the daytime, but before assembling there we often dined at places in the French Quarter, which was then as French as France itself. Here was the Restaurant du Grand Vatel, named after the celebrated and heroic cook of Louis XIV, who, utterly chagrined at the failure of a certain fish to arrive in time for one of his dinners, ended his life by running a sword through his body. The tariff was ridiculously moderate. A dish of soup and a plate of beef and bread cost fifteen cents; soup aux croûtons, five cents; boeuf, légumes, ten cents; veau à la Marengo, twelve cents; mouton à la Ravigotte, ten cents, ragoût de moutons aux pommes, eight cents; boeuf braisé aux oignons, ten cents; macaroni au gratin, six cents; celeri salade, six cents; compote de pommes, four cents; fromage Neufchâtel, three cents; Limbourg, four cents, and Gruyère, three cents. Extra bread was a penny more, and though we insincerely protested against it as a shameless extortion, we never made fifty cents go farther than at those repasts. The very name of the place increased the value received. The sonorousness of it and its traditions sweetened the wine, strengthened the coffee, and deepened repose. The Black Cat confessed queerness. The Taverne Alsacienne was obviously depraved; its atmosphere was of absinthe; dark groups in blue blouses with tobacco pouches hung from their necks whispered there of the Commune.

Where did you dine? There was grandeur in it — at du Grand Vatel.

Then there were occasional intermissions in our poverty, when cheques came like feathers from an angel's wings from the Galaxy, Harper's, Scribner's or Appleton's Journal. The French Quarter was forsaken then. Nothing was too good or too dear for us; we made merry at Delmonico's or at Seighortner's the old mansion of the Astor family in Lafayette Place, which retained the quietude and dignity of a stately private house and provided epicurean food old Seighortner himself, oiliest of hosts, hovering over us, smiling, and rubbing his hands; while the solemn and unhurried waiter set before us the incomparable chicken gumbo, the pompano and English sole and the bird so white and tender that it might have been nursed in the bosom of the same angel that had brushed us with her feathers.

Where is the laughter
That shook the rafter?
Where is the rafter, by the way?