In my autograph copy of "The Footprints of the Padres" Stoddard wrote: "A new memory of Old Monterey is the richer for our meeting here for the first time in the flesh. We have often met in spirit ere this." Whenever we would go walking together, he and I, through the streets of that old Monterey, old no longer save in memory, he would invariably take me to a certain high board fence, and looking through an opening show me the ruins of an adobe house--nothing but a broken fireplace left, moss-grown and crumbling away. "That is my old California," he would say, while his sweet voice was shaken with tears. That desolated hearth seemed to him the symbol of the California which he had known and loved.... But no, the old California that Stoddard loved lives on, and will, because he caught and preserved its spirit and its coloring, its light and life and music. As the redwood thicket holds the sunlight, so do Stoddard's words keep bright and living, though viewed through a mist of tears, the California of other days. In this new edition of "The Footprints" some changes will be found, changes which all will agree make an improvement over the original volume. "Primeval California," first published in October, 1881, in the old Scribner's (now The Century) Magazine, when James G. Holland was its editor, is at times Stoddard at his best. "In Yosemite Shadows" shows us the young Stoddard full of boyish enthusiasm--he could not have been more than twenty when it was written and published, in the old Overland, then edited by Bret Harte. It is more than a gloriously poetic description of Yosemite, when Yosemite still dreamed in its virgin beauty; it is the revelation of a poet's beginnings, for it gives us in the rough, just finding their way to the light, all those gifts which later won Stoddard his fame. The third addition to this volume is "An Affair of the Misty City," a valuable chapter, since it is wholly autobiographical, and at the same time embodies pen portraits of all the celebrities of California's first literary days, that famous group of which Stoddard was one. Of all the group, Ina Coolbrith was closest and dearest to Stoddard's heart. The beautiful abiding friendship which bound the souls of these two poets together has not been surpassed in all the poetry and romance of the world. These last added chapters are taken from "In the Pleasure of His Company," which is out of print and may never be republished. The "Mysterious History," included in the original editions of "The Footprints" has wisely been left out. It had no proper place in the book: Stoddard himself felt that. The additions which have been supplied by Mr. Robertson, who was for years Stoddard's publisher, and in whom the author reposed the utmost confidence, make a real improvement on the original book.