Harte profited by his experience in tutoring my two boy friends, gaining local color quite unlike that of the Sierra foothills.  Humboldt is also on the grand scale and its physical characteristics and its type of manhood were fresh and inspiring.

His familiarity with the marsh and the sloughs is shown in “The Man on the Beach” and the “Dedlow Marsh Stories,” and this affords fine opportunity for judging of the part played by knowledge and by imagination in his literary work.  His descriptions are photographic in their accuracy.  The flight of a flock of sandpipers, the flowing tides, the white line of the bar at the mouth of the bay—­all are exact.  But the locations and relations irrelevant to the story are wholly ignored.  The characters and happenings are purely imaginary.  He is the artist using his experiences and his fancy as his colors, and the minimum of experience and small observation suffice.  His perception of character is marvelous.  He pictures the colonel, his daughters, the spruce lieutenant, and the Irish deserter with such familiarity that the reader would think that he had spent most of his life in a garrison, and his ability to portray vividly life in the mines, where his actual experience was so very slight, is far better understood.

Many of the occurrences of those far-away days have faded from my mind, but one of them, of considerable significance to two lives, is quite clear.  Uniontown had been the county-seat, and there the Humboldt Times was published; but Eureka, across the bay, had outgrown her older sister and captured both the county-seat and the only paper in the county.  In frantic effort to sustain her failing prestige Uniontown projected a rival paper and the Northern Californian was spoken into being.  My father was a half owner, and I coveted the humble position of printer’s devil.  One journeyman could set the type, and on Wednesday and Saturday, respectively, run off on a hand-press the outside and the inside of the paper, but a boy or a low-priced man was needed to roll the forms and likewise to distribute the type.  I looked upon it as the first rung on the ladder of journalism, and I was about to put my foot thereon when the pathetic figure of Bret Harte presented itself applying for the job, causing me to put my foot on my hopes instead.  He seemed to want it and need it so much more than I did that I turned my hand to other pursuits, while he mounted the ladder with cheerful alacrity and skipped up several rungs, very promptly learning to set type and becoming a very acceptable assistant editor.

In a community where popular heroes are apt to be loud and aggressive, the quiet man who thinks more than he talks is adjudged effeminate.  Harte was always modest, and boasting was foreign to his nature; so he was thought devoid of spirit and strength.  But occasion brought out the unsuspected.  There had been a long and trying Indian war in and around Humboldt.  The feeling against the red men was