"But wishing a change, I wanted to go to the big metropolis. No, not to the country; not for me those parasitic, pestering and polished summer hotels, where a pile of people get together to gossip and giggle and gormandize and bore each other for several weeks. An accident once brought me to one of these places. I went out to see some friends, and I know what they are. They spend most of their time dressing; these vacationists dress three times a day; the green waist, and yellow waist, the brown skirt and the blue suit, the red jacket, the white hat, and the gray coat, and then the same turn over again; they fill themselves with all sorts of heavy and unwholesome foods brought from the cities; they sit around the verandas and talk all day, never daring to venture into the woods; they do no good to themselves, coming home tired and sick, and they do unspeakable wrong by turning good, honest farmers into parasitic, sophisticated boarder-breeders, and by turning them away from the tilling of the soil. No more of these places for me. Of course, if one could go into the woods and live as simply as a savage for awhile it would be fine; but one needs a tent, and I never did own any real estate. "But this time I wanted a complete change; I wanted something to move and stir me out of the given groove, the beaten path I was falling into, some excitement that would shake the cobwebs out of my brain, so I turned towards the East Side. "They are all there, the comrades, the radicals, the red ones, and dreamers; people who are free because they own nothing. Poets, philosophers, novelists, dramatists, artists, editors, agitators and other idle and useless beings, they form a great galaxy in the New York Ghetto. For several years, ever since I left New York, I had been receiving instruction and inspiration from them through the medium of the Yiddish and the Socialist press, where my own things often appeared beside their spirited outpourings, and now I was overcome by an overpowering desire to meet them again, talk matters over and fight it all out. There is no sham about the East Side branch of the ancient and most honorable order of Bohemians--the little changing, moving world that is flowing with the milk of human kindness and the honey of fraternal affections, where those who live may die and those who die may live. Here among the East Side Bohemians people feel freely, act independently, speak as they think and are not at all ashamed of their feelings. They have courage. They wear their convictions in public. They do as they please, whether that pleases everybody else or not. They talk with the purpose of saying something. They write with the object of expressing their ideas. They tell the truth and shame those who do not. Hearts are warm because they own their souls. Those who really own their souls will never lose them. As Joseph Bovshover, the fine poet of the East Side has sung: