Some years ago, when the popular writer and his wife were spending the summer at Newport, a woman said confidentially to Mrs. Harte, "What is your husband's real name?" It evidently did not seem natural to the inquirer that an author could always have borne such a crisp and striking name; and the same idea, that the name must be simply a happy pseudonym, has, we believe, struck many others. The idea is partly wrong and partly right. Francis Brett Harte was his name originally. That form was changed to Francis Bret Harte, then to F. Bret Harte, and finally to the attractive form which long ago endeared itself to the whole English-reading world. For it is well known, undoubtedly, that the Bret Harte stories are quite as popular in England and in the British colonies as in the United States; that Germany yields to none in her admiration for them; and that one of them, "Gabriel Conroy," has been printed in at least fourteen languages. Indeed, a quarter of a century ago the name of Bret Harte was as powerful the world over as was Mr. Kipling's a few years since. Perhaps the felicitous brevity of the name was one of the elements of that power. Bret Harte was born in Albany, N. Y., on August 25, 1839. His father was at that time a teacher in the Albany Female Seminary. Bret was still in boyhood when his father died. The boy, who had received an ordinary public school education, went to California with his mother in 1854. The Golden State was then one enormous mining-camp. The laws were largely unwritten. A passion either for gold or for adventure had taken possession of thousands of persons and thrown them together in one of the wildest parts of the world. In this exciting school of life young Harte studied his first lessons of life. For three years he was thrown hither and thither, with his eyes and his ears wide open, and with his mind sponging up the lively incidents which, through his skillful pen, have since become the idyls of the pioneer West, with all its vice and virtue, its heroes and cravens, its showy wealth and its heart-touching poverty. For a year he was an express rider, with a route lying among the ravines and gulches of the northern part of the State; and what he had not learned by his own observation he learned during this period from other observers. This was the time when Yuba Bill and the other heroic road-agents took form in his imagination. At another time he picked up the trade of compositor in a newspaper office in Eureka; and at still another time he went out prospecting, and there was a sign of later days in the fact that before the three years of his uncertainty came to an end he taught school for a short while. It was then that, for the first time, he indulged the literary instincts awakened by his experience in the newspaper office in Eureka. This budding age is outlined in "M'liss."