A comparative study of the poems certainly reveals the fact that one set was influenced by the other. "Cicely" and "Little Breeches" have very much in common. They are in the same meter, and in one place they have practically identical lines: But I takes mine straight without sugar, and that's what's the matter of me.--_Cicely._ I want a chaw of terbacker, And that's what's the matter with me. --_Little Breeches._ There are similarities in others of the poems: Don't know Flynn,-- Flynn of Virginia,-- Long as he's been 'yar? Look 'ee here, stranger, Whar _hev_ you been? --_In the Tunnel._ Whar have you been for the last three year. That you haven't heard folks tell How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks The night of the _Prairie Belle_? --_Jim Bludso._ It must be confessed that a study of the ballads and of the other poetical works of the two poets leaves one with the impression that Harte was first in the field. Hay's six Pike County ballads stand isolated among his poems. Everything he wrote before them and after them is in an utterly different key. One feels as he reads him straight through--the earlier lyrics, _Castilian Days_, the later lyrics, _The Bread-winners_, _The Life of Lincoln_--that these poems came from an impulse, that they must have been thrown off in quick succession all at one time in answer to some sudden impression. One feels, therefore, more like trusting a contemporary biographical sketch than the unsupported impressions of contemporaries thirty years after the event. A sketch of John Hay, written by Clarence King in April, 1874, records that when Hay returned from Spain in 1870 All the world was reading Mr. Bret Harte's "Heathen Chinee" and Mr. Hay did what all the world was doing.... He read all the poems, but "Chiquita" and "Cicely," which gave him particular pleasure, puzzled him and set him to thinking.... He saw how infinitely nobler and better than nature they were, but, having been born and brought up as a Pike himself, he saw that they were not nature. He wrote "Little Breeches" for his own amusement--at least we have heard this is his account of the matter--to see how a genuine Western feeling expressed in genuine Western language, would impress Western people.... The ballads were written within a few days of each other: two of them in a single evening.[55]