screech" The vagabond confesses that he is a Bohemian." Yes, I was born in the Arme-gasse, just off the Cour des Miracles, in the city of Prague. I was brought up among the Zingari, attained some proficiency in the Rommany language, and have some slight knowledge of the affairs of Egypt. I had a sister called Esmeralda, who was very fond of a goat, was much beloved by a deformed wretch by the name of Quasimodo, and was unfortunately hanged on the Parvis of Notre Dame de Paris. My putative mamma, Azucena, got into trouble (through some tender passages of mine with a certain Leonora-non di scordar di me; Lenny-) and was barbecued on a gridiron by the cruel Conte de Luna, Chairman of Quarter Sessions, and member of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. I know all the harbours on the sea-coast of Bohemia. I can tell fortunes if you will cross my hand with silver, and whisper a horse if you will lend me one, and I think I could do a little tinkering

if

you would confide to me your kettle. I wonder what a Bohemian really is. Sam Johnson, I suppose, was one-the glorious old Doctor, who kept school and slept on bulks and in the ashes of glass houses, who kicked his heels in Chesterfield's ante-chamber and cowered in a horseman's coat behind a screen in Mr. Cave's dining-room, eating humble-pie and correcting the proofs of the Parliament of Lilliput; who was a dozen times locked up in a sponging-house, and had to write "Rasselas" to pay for his mother's funeral, and was given to carrying home exhausted wantons on his back, and to entertaining in his house blind women and starved-out apothecaries, and lived to write the "Lives of the Poets" and

the "English Dictionary." I suppose this man, whose biography Peers and M.P.'s and Professors are now glad to annotate and gloze over, was a Bohemian. But, I suppose, the drunken, conceited, crack-brained, worthless scamp, Jemmy Boswell, and the gross, fat-headed brewer, Thrale, who gorged himself at last into a fit of apoplexy and died from overeating, were not Bohemians. Oh dear no! Jemmy was the heir to a baronetcy, and Thrale was a parliament-mana gentleman of high social position, and the proprietor of a brew-house in Southwark, which his widow sold to a Quaker for a hundred-thousand pounds, vending, not only so many boilers and vats, but "the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice." And I think that were Spenser and Shakspere alive, and were they to go into partnership as poets, they would be held, in the opinion of the Court Newsman and the select circles, vastly inferior to Barclay and Perkins. Bohemians! Why, David the King was a Bohemian. Why, Napoleon the Great was one. Work hard and scorn the world, and the dullards and the dolts will fling Bohemian in your teeth. To the subscriber, Bohemianism at the mezzo cammin of life resolves itself into having worked twelve hours a day for many years, into having paid his butcher and his baker and avoided that Insolvent Court through which so many non-Bohemians have genteelly passed, with never having been indebted to a patron for a penny, to a minister for a place in the Custom House, or to a critic for a kind word.

The "House of Lords" is a tavern, and therefore beyond the pale of gentility; but I shall ever preserve a kindly re

membrance of the place, for there I first met Artemus Ward, the drollest of living American humorists.

Could I say anything more-if you granted me those thousand pages-about New York? Good lack! my tongue and pen should run faster than ever well-trained mare flew over the Fashion Course. Wall Street and William Street! —what might not be written about the Gold Room and the Stock Exchange, the speculators in "corners," and the jobbers who were "short" of Harlem? Maiden Lane, what opportunities for word painting do not thy stores, teeming with multifarious merchandise, afford! John Street, is there nothing to be said concerning thy steel! Pine Street, could not pages be indited concerning thy counting houses! Nassau Street, stands there not, at the corner of one of thy blocks, the office of the New York Herald; and out of the Herald and its editor and proprietor might not many chapters be made! Why, a whole volume or two has been written on James Gordon Bennett. Do not Fourth Avenue and Sixth Avenue invite description! Shall nothing be said about Grand Street! Am I to pass by the grand Pompeian clothing establishments of Broadway and Canal Streets; the dazzling goldsmith's wares of Tiffany and Ball and Black; the sumptuous, marble-fronted, dry goods store of E. T. Stewart; the numberless modistes and fleuristes of the fashionable quarters in silent contempt! A chapter for Washington Market; a chapter for the Tombs; a chapter for Brady the photographer; a chapter for the Dusseldorf Gallery, another for the Cooper Institute, another for the common schools, another for the free-lovers, another for the express and railway ticket

offices, another for the "Oriental Saloons with pretty waiter girls," another for the boarding-houses; ten chapters, at least, for Shoddy-Cotton Shoddy, Gold Shoddy, Scrip Shoddy, Contract Shoddy, Political Shoddy, and Petroleum Shoddy, and still my task would be but half accomplished. I should have then left out the somnambulists, the mesmerists, and the fortune-tellers, the characteristics of Mackerelville and the curiosities of Commanipaw, the sports of High Bridge, the delights of the Bloomingdale Road, and the beauties of the Greenwood Cemetery over the water; to say nothing of the Astor and Mercantile Libraries, Barnum's Museum, the City Hall, and the art collection of the Aspinwalls, the Wrights, the Lennoxes, the Barlows, the Grahams of New York and its vicinity.

But I haven't got the thousand pages. I am near the end of my tether already; and it has come to this: that of a city of a million souls I can give you no more detailed account than can be comprised in a narrative of a walk down Broadway.

Now Broadway is literally the back-bone of New York, and indeed the shape of the city proper is not unlike that of the fish called the sole. Assume Broadway to be the spine, the bridge over the Harlem river the head, the Battery and Castle Garden the tail; the ferries to Brooklyn and Jersey City the fins, the avenues running parallel to the spine the roes-but there are eight-and the streets that branch off at right angles, from Eighth as high up, I think, as Seventythird Street, will stand for that fringe of small bones in the sole which, nicely browned, you are always tempted to eat,

and which half-choke you. My Manhattan fish must be a sole à la Normande, for the shores of New Jersey and Long Island will represent the edges of the dish, the East and the North, the Harlem river, and the Bay, will stand for the sauce, and the numerous exquisitely beautiful islands which dot the surface of these waters may do duty for the morsels of mushroom and cockscomb which make the garniture of a sole à la Normande so delicious. The simile I have striven to establish may be but questionably appropriate, since a sole is the one fish quite unknown in the New York market. Aha! my luxurious brothers, you have no soles. You may order one at Delmonico's, or the Maison Dorée; but they will bring you a sorry substitute in the shape of a filet, a gratin, a Normande, or a friture of flounder.

Well, then, I will take this vertebrated column, and endeavour to trace its course through the great corpus of Manhattan :-only I must begin with the lumbar vertebræ, then touch the dorsal, and terminate with the cervical.

I came to New York, on the twenty-ninth of November, 1863, by the wrong door. I should properly have chosen, in England, one of the New York in lieu of the Boston steamers of the Cunard line. As it was, instead of crossing the Atlantic "right away" in the superb "Scotia" or the luxurious “Persia,” and entering the beautiful bay of New York by the Narrows, I chose, or had chosen for me, the comfortable but rather slow-going " Arabia," a Boston boat. Eleven days would have sufficed to bring us direct to New York; but in the voyage to Boston we consumed fourteen and a-half-were half-smothered in the usual fogs about the

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