"Well, thar--Good-bye-- No more, sir--I-- Eh? What's that you say?-- Why, dern it!--sho!-- No? Yea! By Jo! Sold! Sold! Why, you limb! You ornery, Derned old Long-legged Jim!" Bret Harte had many imitators, and not only did our newspaper poetry for a number of years abound in the properties of Californian life, such as gulches, placers, divides, etc., but writers further east applied his method to other conditions. Of these by far the most successful was John Hay, a native of Indiana and private secretary to President Lincoln, whose _Little Breeches_, _Jim Bludso_, and _Mystery of Gilgal_ have rivaled Bret Harte's own verses in popularity. In the last-named piece the reader is given to feel that there is something rather cheerful and humorous in a bar-room fight which results in "the gals that winter, as a rule," going "alone to singing school." In the two former we have heroes of the Bret Harte type, the same combination of superficial wickedness with inherent loyalty and tenderness. The profane farmer of the South-west, who "doesn't pan out on the prophets," and who had taught his little son "to chaw terbacker, just to keep his milk-teeth white," but who believes in God and the angels ever since the miraculous recovery of the same little son when lost on the prairie in a blizzard; and the unsaintly and bigamistic captain of the _Prairie Belle_, who died like a hero, holding the nozzle of his burning boat against the bank "Till the last galoot's ashore."