ABSTRACT
Last spring: the spring of 1860, I mean—if this communication waits as long as some of mine have done, it may be spring before last, or spring before that, when it is published—in the spring of 1860, I say, it was rumored in New York that a club of Bohemians had been established on the European principle; an idea which provoked much ridicule from some of the Europeans settled among us. This set Carl Benson a-thinking (for he does perform that operation sometimes, and it was not the first time he had performed it on the very same subject) about the differentia of the Bohemian—what he is and what he is not, what properly constitutes him, and whether he is a specific product of a particular city, as the European critics alluded to seem to think, or one of all civilized countries.
