at
both ends.

The Jackal may do all these things, but he may not, if he is treated,
fail to treat in return. I do not mean to say at all that Jackaling is a
business highly esteemed, even in darkest Bohemia, but it is considered
legitimate, and I hope that no gentleman doing business in Wall Street,
or on the Consolidated Exchange, will feel too deeply grieved when he
learns the fact.

But where have the real Bohemians fled to from the presence of the
too-well-disposed and too-wealthy children of the Benedick and the
Holbein? Not where they are likely to find him, you may be sure. The
true Bohemian does not carry his true address on his card. In fact, he
is delicate to the point of sensitiveness about allowing any publicity
to attach to his address. He communicates it confidentially to those
with whom he has business dealings, but he carefully conceals it from
the prying world. As soon as the world knows it he moves. I once asked a
chief of the Bohemian tribe whose residence was the world, but whose
temporary address was sometimes Paris, why he had moved from the
Quartier Latin to a place in Montmartre.

"Had to, my dear fellow," he answered, with dignity; "why if you live
over on that side of the river they'll call you a _Bohemian_!"

In Paris the home of wit in poverty has been moved across the Seine to
the south side of the hill up which people climb to make pilgrimages to
the Moulin Rouge and the church of St. Pierre de Montmartre. In New York
it has been moved not only across that river of human intercourse that
we call Broadway--a river with a tidal ebb and flow of travel and
traffic--but across a wilder, stranger, and more turbulent flood called
the Bowery, to a region of which the well-fed and prosperous New Yorker
knows very, very little.

As more foreigners walk on the Bowery than walk on any other street in
New York; and as more different nationalities are represented there than
are represented in any other street in New York; and as the foreigners
all say that the Bowery is the most marvellous thoroughfare in the
world, I think we are justified in assuming that there is little reason
to doubt that the foreigners are entirely right in the matter,
especially as their opinion coincides with that of every American who
has ever made even a casual attempt to size up the Bowery.

[Illustration]

No one man can thoroughly know a great city. People say that Dickens
knew London, but I am sure that Dickens w