If there was a spot on earth of which the usual dead monotony of the California seasons seemed a perfectly consistent and natural expression, that spot was the ancient and time-honored _pueblo_ and Mission of the blessed St. Anthony. The changeless, cloudless, expressionless skies of the summer seemed to symbolize that aristocratic conservatism which expelled all innovation and was its distinguishing mark.... As he drew rein in the court-yard of the first large _adobe_ dwelling, and received the grave welcome of a strange but kindly face, he saw around him everywhere the past unchanged. The sun shone as brightly and fiercely on the long red tiles of the low roofs, that looked as if they had been thatched with longitudinal slips of cinnamon, even as it had shone for the last hundred years; the gaunt wolf-like dogs ran out and barked at him as their fathers and mothers had barked at the preceding stranger of twenty years before. There were the few wild, half-broken mustangs tethered by strong riatas before the veranda of the long low _Fonda_, with the sunlight glittering on their silver trappings; there were the broad, blank expanses of whitewashed _adobe_ wall, as barren and guiltless of record as the uneventful days, as monotonous and expressionless as the staring sky above; there were the white, dome-shaped towers of the Mission rising above the green of olives and pear trees, twisted, gnarled and knotted with the rheumatism of age. ... The steamers that crept slowly up the darkening coast line were something remote, unreal, and phantasmal; since the Philippine galleon had left its bleached and broken ribs in the sand in 1640, no vessel had, in the memory of man, dropped anchor in the open roadstead below the curving Point of Pines. Meager and fragmentary as these Spanish sketches are, they nevertheless opened the way for a new school of American romance. III Harte's first story with other than a legendary theme was _M'liss_, written for the _Golden Era_ sometime before 1867. For the student of his literary art it is the most important of all his writings, especially important because of the revision which he made of it later after he had evolved his final manner. It is transition work. The backgrounds are traced in with Irving-like care; the character of the schoolmaster is done with artistic restraint and certainty of touch. M'liss is exquisitely handled. There is nothing better in all his work than this study of the fiery, jealous little heart of the neglected child. It is not necessarily a California story; it could have happened as well even in New England. It is not _genre_ work, not mere exploiting of local oddities; it is worked out in life itself, and it strikes the universal human chord that brings it into the realm of true art.