_Tales of Trail and Town_, 1898; _Stories in Light and Shadow_, 1898; _Mr. Jack Hamlin's Meditation_, 1899; _From Sandhill to Pine_, 1900; _Under the Redwoods_, 1901; _Openings in the Old Trail_, 1902; _Life of Bret Harte_, by T. Edgar Pemberton, 1903; _Bret Harte_, by Henry W. Boynton, 1905; _The Life of Bret Harte with Some Account of the California Pioneers_, by Henry Childs Merwin, 1911. CHAPTER V THE DISCOVERY OF PIKE COUNTY The new era of vulgarity in literature, complained of by Stedman, came as a revolt against mid-century tendencies. The movement was not confined to America. In the early seventies, as we have seen, Millet and his Breton peasants for a time took possession of French art; Hardy with his Wessex natives caught the ear of England; Björnson made the discovery that in the Scandinavian peasant lay the only survival of the old Norse spirit; and the Russians Tourgenieff and Tolstoy cast aside the old mythology and told with minuteness the life of the peasant and the serf. Everywhere there was a swing toward the wild and unconventional, even toward the coarse and repulsive. The effeminacy of early Tennysonianism, the cloying sweetness of the mid-century annual, Keatsism, _Hyperionism_, Heineism, had culminated in reaction. There was a craving for the acrid tang of uncultivated things in borderlands and fields unsown. In America had sprung up a group of humorists who had filled the newspapers and magazines of the era with that masculine laughter which was echoing along the Mississippi and the Ohio and the gold camps of the Sierras. They were pioneers; they were looking for incongruities and exaggerations, and quite by accident they discovered a new American type, the Pike,--strange creature to inspire a new literature. I America has evolved four types, perhaps five, that are unique "new birth of our new soil": the Yankee of the Hosea Biglow and Sam Lawson variety; the frontiersman and scout exemplified in Leather Stocking; the Southern "darky" as depicted by Russell, Harris, Page, and others; the circuit rider of the frontier period; and the Pike.