rangers did not often wander in there, she said that it was a very
nice place to live in. I told her that I knew it _had_ been a very nice
place to live in.

THE BOWERY AND BOHEMIA

One day a good many years ago an old gentleman from
Rondout-on-the-Hudson--then plain Rondout--was walking up Broadway
seeing the sights. He had not been in New York in ten or twelve years,
and although he was an old gentleman who always had a cask of good ale
in his cellar in the winter-time, yet he had never tasted the strange
German beverage called lager-beer, which he had heard and read about. So
when he saw its name on a sign he went in and drank a mug, sipping it
slowly and thoughtfully, as he would have sipped his old ale. He found
it refreshing--peculiar--and, well, on the whole, very refreshing
indeed, as he considerately told the proprietor.

But what interested him more than the beer was the sight of a group of
young men seated around a table drinking beer, reading--and--yes,
actually writing verses, and bandying very lively jests among
themselves. The old gentleman could not help hearing their conversation,
and when he went out into the street he shook his head thoughtfully.

[Illustration]

"I wonder what my father would have said to that?" he reflected. "Young
gentlemen sitting in a pot-house at high noon and turning verses like so
many ballad-mongers! Well, well, well, if those are the ways of
lager-beer drinkers, I'll stick to my good old ale!"

And greatly surprised would that honest old gentleman have been to know
that the presence of that little group of poets and humorists attracted
as much custom to good Mr. Pfaff's beer-saloon as did his fresh, cool
lager; and that young men, and, for the matter of that, men not so
young, stole in there to listen to their contests of wit, and to wish
and yearn and aspire to be of their goodly company. For the old
gentleman little dreamed, as he went on his course up Broadway, that he
had seen the first Bohemians of New York, and that these young men would
be written about and talked about and versified about for generations to
come. Unconscious of this honor he went on to Fourteenth Street to see
the new square they were laying out there.

[Illustration]

Perhaps nothing better marks the place where the city of New York got
clean and clear out of provincial pettiness into metropolitan tolerance
than the advent of the Bohemians. Twenty-five years earlier they would
have