of mine, an
editor in _New_ York, both of whom narrated to me at very great length "a
grotesque Iliad of the wild career" of this remarkable man.

It never rains but it pours. Frank Leslie, who had been with me on
Barnum's _Illustrated News_, was now publishing half-a-dozen periodicals
and newspapers, and offered me a fair price to give him my mornings. I
did so. Unfortunately, my work was not specified, and he retained his
old editors, who naturally enough did not want me, although they treated
me civilly enough. One of these was Thomas Powell, who had seen a great
deal of all the great English writers of the last generation. But there
was much rather shady, shaky Bohemianism about the frequenters of our
sanctum, and, all things considered, it was a pity that I ever entered
it.

_Und noch weiter_. There was published in New York at that time (1860)
an illustrated comic weekly called _Vanity Fair_. There was also in the
city a kind of irregular club known as the Bohemians, who had been
inspired by Murger's novel of that name to imitate the life of its
heroes. They met every evening at a lager-beer restaurant kept by a
German named Pfaff. For a year or two they made a great sensation in New
York. Their two principal men were Henry Clapp and Fitz-James O'Brien.
Then there were Frank Wood and George Arnold, W. Winter, C. Gardette, and
others. Wood edited _Vanity Fair_, and all the rest contributed to it.
There was some difficulty or other between Wood and Mr. Stephens, the
_gerant_ of the weekly, and Wood left, followed by all the clan. I was
called in in the emergency, and what with writing myself, and the aid of
R. H. Stoddard, T. B. Aldrich, and a few more, we made a very creditable
appearance indeed. Little by little the Bohemians all came back, and all
went well.

Now I must here specify, for good reasons, that I held myself very
strictly aloof from the Bohemians, save in business affairs. This was
partly because I was married, and I never saw the day in my life when to
be regarded as a real Bohemian vagabond, or shiftless person, would not
have given me the horrors. I would have infinitely preferred the poorest
settled employment to such life. I mention this because a very brilliant
and singular article entitled "Charles G. Leland _l'ennemi des
Allemands_" (this title angered me), which appeared in the _Revue des
Deux Mondes_ in 1871, speaks of me by implication as a frequenter of
Pfaff's, declari