Pettit was a rugged fellow, with a kind of shame-faced culture, and my good friend.  His father kept a general store in a little town called Hosea.  Pettit had been raised in the pine-woods and broom-sedge fields adjacent thereto.  He had in his gripsack two manuscript novels of the adventures in Picardy of one Gaston Laboulaye, Vicompte de Montrepos, in the year 1329.  That’s nothing.  We all do that.  And some day when we make a hit with the little sketch about a newsy and his lame dog, the editor prints the other one for us—­or “on us,” as the saying is—­and then—­and then we have to get a big valise and peddle those patent air-draft gas burners.  At $1.25 everybody should have ’em.

I took Pettit to the red-brick house which was to appear in an article entitled “Literary Landmarks of Old New York,” some day when we got through with it.  He engaged a room there, drawing on the general store for his expenses.  I showed New York to him, and he did not mention how much narrower Broadway is than Lee Avenue in Hosea.  This seemed a good sign, so I put the final test.

“Suppose you try your hand at a descriptive article,” I suggested, “giving your impressions of New York as seen from the Brooklyn Bridge.  The fresh point of view, the—­”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Pettit.  “Let’s go have some beer.  On the whole I rather like the city.”

We discovered and enjoyed the only true Bohemia.  Every day and night we repaired to one of those palaces of marble and glass and tilework, where goes on a tremendous and sounding epic of life.  Valhalla itself could not be more glorious and sonorous.  The classic marble on which we ate, the great, light-flooded, vitreous front, adorned with snow-white scrolls; the grand Wagnerian din of clanking cups and bowls, the flashing staccato of brandishing cutlery, the piercing recitative of the white-aproned grub-maidens at the morgue-like banquet tables; the recurrent lied-motif of the cash-register—­it was a gigantic, triumphant welding of art and sound, a deafening, soul-uplifting pageant of heroic and emblematic life.  And the beans were only ten cents.  We wondered why our fellow-artists cared to dine at sad little tables in their so-called Bohemian restaurants; and we shuddered lest they should seek out our resorts and make them conspicuous with their presence.

Pettit wrote many stories, which the editors returned to him.  He wrote love stories, a thing I have always kept free from, holding the belief that the well-known and popular sentiment is not properly a matter for publication, but something to be privately handled by the alienists and florists.  But the editors had told him that they wanted love stories, because they said the women read them.

Now, the editors are wrong about that, of course.  Women do not read the love stories in the magazines.  They read the poker-game stories and the recipes for cucumber lotion.  The love stories are read by fat cigar drummers and little ten-year-old girls.  I am not criticising the judgment of editors.  They are mostly very fine men, but a man can be but one man, with individual opinions and tastes.  I knew two associate editors of a magazine who were wonderfully alike in almost everything.  And yet one of them was very fond of Flaubert, while the other preferred gin.