Bret Harte will always be associated with the California of the “forty-niners.” Gold digger, teacher, express messenger by turns, he was setting up his own sketches among the compositors of the San Francisco _Golden Era_ while still in his ’teens. The sketches brought him into the editorial room, and then to his own chair of the _Weekly Californian_, where he vindicated his title by the clever _Condensed Novels_. A secretaryship in the United States Branch Mint gave him leisure to gain wide popularity in verse. On this he mounted to his height. The year 1868 is cardinal in his life and in the history of American literature; for in that year was founded _The Overland Monthly_; and the young man of the hour was made its editor. Its second number (August, 1868) contained the most widely known, perhaps, of all American short stories, _The Luck of Roaring Camp_. The three years of his editorship include his most popular work, and perhaps his most enduring. He made the whole country laugh and weep by his verse, he established a magazine of solid merit, and he gave new life to the short story. To this growth his removal to the East in 1871 put a period. Continuing his production pretty steadily on the Atlantic seaboard, in his consulships at Crefeld (1878) and at Glasgow (1880), and finally during seventeen years in London (1885–1902), he hardly advanced in art. That his art survived the transplanting is sufficiently proved by the long list of his books; but it did not thrive. His constant recurrence to the old themes suggests that he missed the strong western soil. The familiar tale reprinted here is typical of Bret Harte’s field, geographical and artistic. His local color no longer keeps the separate value attached to it alike by many of his admirers and by himself. The California of his stories, sometimes drawn to the life, as in _Johnson’s Old Woman_, is often that California, made of stock desperadoes, stage-drivers, and gulches, which is the delight of melodrama. Melodramatic Harte is incorrigibly. _Mrs. Skaggs_ is the Dumas adventuress; and the people of her story can hardly be seen off the boards. _The Iliad of Sandy Bar_ shows that cheap shifting from farce humor to false pathos which catches the throats of the gallery. Though in fact he had the knowledge of actual contact, he saw California as his master Dickens saw London, through a haze of romance. The stories of both are woven from the suggestions of actual places; but in the weaving the actuality has faded.