Once he had begun, however, there was no possibility of stopping. The people demanded work like _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ and would accept nothing else. It is pathetic to see him during the early years of his great fame, trying to impress upon the reading public that he is a poet after the old definition of the word. The _Atlantic_ had paid him $10,000 to write for a year work like _The Luck of Roaring Camp_. He gave four stories, and he gave also five careful poems of the Longfellow-Whittier type. By 1873 he had put forth no fewer than fourteen books, nine of them being poems or collections of his poetry. In vain. The public ordered him back to the mines and camps that even then were as obsolete as the pony express across the Plains. Despite his biographers, the latter part of his life is full of mystery. After seven years of literary work in New York City, he went in 1878 as consul to Crefeld, Germany. Two years later he was transferred to Glasgow, Scotland, where he remained for five years. The rest of his life he spent in London, writing year after year new books of California stories. He never returned to America; he was estranged from his family; he seemed to wish to sever himself entirely from all that had to do with his earlier life. He died May 5, 1902, and was buried in Frimby churchyard, in Surrey. IV A novelist must rise or fall with his characters. What of Harte? First of all we must observe that he makes no attempts at character development. Each personage introduced is the same at the close of the story as at the opening. He has no fully studied character: we have a burning moment, a flashlight glimpse--intense, paradoxical, startling, then no more. We never see the person again. The name may appear in later sketches, but it never designates the same man. Colonel Starbottle is consistent from story to story only in make-up, in stage "business," and the well known "gags"--as, for instance, a succession of phrases qualified by the adjective "blank." "Yuba Bill" is Harte's synonym for stage driver, "Jack Hamlin" for gambler. We have a feeling constantly that the characters are brought in simply to excite wonder. Gabriel Conroy devotes his life for years to the finding of his sister Grace. He leaves his wife to search for her; he can think of nothing else; yet when at length he does find her among the witnesses in a courtroom he takes it as a mere commonplace. A moment later, however, when told that his wife, for whom we know he cares nothing at all, has given birth to a son, he falls headlong in a swoon.