It was the new humor of the West for the first time shown to the whole world. Lincoln, the man of the West, had met the polished East in the person of Douglas and had triumphed through very genuineness, and now he stood in the limelight of the Presidency, transacting the nation's business with anecdotes from the frontier circuits, meeting hostile critics with shrewd border philosophy, and reading aloud with unction, while battles were raging or election returns were in doubt, from "Artemus Ward," or "Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby," or _The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi_--favorites of his because they too were genuine, excerpts not from books but from life itself. II Glimpses there already had been of the new humor of the West. George W. Harris (1814-1868), steamboat captain on the Tennessee River, had created that true child of the West, "Sut Lovengood"; Augustus B. Longstreet (1790-1870) in _Georgia Scenes_ had drawn inimitable sketches of the rude life of his region; and Joseph G. Baldwin (1815-1864), like Lincoln, himself a lawyer who had learned much on his frontier circuit, in his _Flush Times_ had traced the evolution of a country barrister in a manner that even now, despite its echoes of Dickens, makes the book a notable one. But the greatest of them all, the real father of the new school of humorists, the man who gave the East the first glimpse of the California type of humor, was George Horatio Derby (1823-1861), whose sketches over the signature "John Phoenix" began to appear in the early fifties. Undoubtedly it would amaze Derby could he return and read of himself as the father of the later school of humor. With him literary comedy was simply a means now and then of relaxation from the burdens of a strenuous profession. He had been graduated from West Point in 1846, had fought in the Mexican War, and later as an engineer had been entrusted by the government with important surveys and explorations in the far West and later in Florida, where he died at the age of thirty-eight of sunstroke. He was burdened all his life with heavy responsibilities and exacting demands upon his energies. He had little time for books, and his writings, what few he produced, were the result wholly of his own observations upon the picturesque life that he found about him in the West. In his _Phoenixiana_, published in 1855, we find nearly all of the elements that were to be used by the new school of humorists. First, there is the solemn protestation of truthfulness followed by the story that on the face of it is impossible. "If the son of the reader ... should look confidingly into his parent's face, and inquire--'Is that true, Papa?' reply, oh, reader, unhesitatingly--'My son, it is.'" To make the story still more plausible he quotes "Truthful James." He may then proceed with a story like this: