Charles Warren Stoddard was born in Rochester, N. Y., 7th August, 1843. At an early age he left his native state, with his family and emigrated to California, that fertile foster-mother of American literary men. In that delightful state, region of plants and flowers, was passed his boyhood, a boyhood rich in promise, strengthened by a good education. With a natural bent for travel, fed by the tales of travellers and the waters of romance, it was his happy luck, at the age of twenty-three to find himself appointed to that really bright journal, the _San Francisco Chronicle_, as its correspondent. The commission was a roving one, and the young correspondent was left free to contribute sketches in his own inimitable way. Let us believe that the editor well knew the choice mind he had secured in the young writer, and so knowing was unwilling to put restrictions of the common newspaper kind in his way. How could such a correspondent be harnessed in the dull statistics and ribald gossip of these days? It was otherwise, as we his debtors know. He was to wander at his own sweet will. The slight vein of sweet melancholy that came with his life, drove him far from the grimy haunts of civilization, far from the sickening thud of men thrown against the cobble-stones of poverty. He sailed away with not a pang of sorrow to those golden isles embedded in summer seas, where the moon “Seems to shine with a sunny ray, And the night looks like a mellowed day. Isles where all things save man seem to have grown hoar in calm. In calm unbroken since their luscious youth.”