type of story:  the romantically picturesque “human-interest” story.  “He created the local color story,” Prof.  Blankenship remarks, “or at least popularized it, and he gave new form and intent to the short story.”  Character motivating action is central to this type of story, rather than mood dominating incident.  Again Harte’s style is really an eminently skilful one, admirably suited to his subjects.  He can manage the humorous or the pathetic excellently, and his restraint in each is more remarkable than his excesses.  His sentences have both force and flow; his backgrounds are crisply but carefully sketched; his characters and caricatures have their own logical consistency.  Finally, granted the desirability of the theatric finale, it is necessary to admit that Harte always rings down his curtain dramatically and effectively.

Arthur Zeiger, M.A.

THE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP

There was commotion in Roaring Camp.  It could not have been a fight, for in 1850 that was not novel enough to have called together the entire settlement.  The ditches and claims were not only deserted, but “Tuttle’s grocery” had contributed its gamblers, who, it will be remembered, calmly continued their game the day that French Pete and Kanaka Joe shot each other to death over the bar in the front room.  The whole camp was collected before a rude cabin on the outer edge of the clearing.  Conversation was carried on in a low tone, but the name of a woman was frequently repeated.  It was a name familiar enough in the camp,—­“Cherokee Sal.”

Perhaps the less said of her the better.  She was a coarse and, it is to be feared, a very sinful woman.  But at that time she was the only woman in Roaring Camp, and was just then lying in sore extremity, when she most needed the ministration of her own sex.  Dissolute, abandoned, and irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her loneliness.  The primal curse had come to her in that original isolation which must have made the punishment of the first transgression so dreadful.  It was, perhaps, part of the expiation of her sin that, at a moment when she most lacked her sex’s intuitive tenderness and care, she met only the half-contemptuous faces of her masculine associates.  Yet a few of the spectators were, I think, touched by her sufferings.  Sandy Tipton thought it was “rough on Sal,” and, in the contemplation of her condition, for a moment rose superior to the fact that he had an ace and two bowers in his sleeve.

It will be seen also that the situation was novel.  Deaths were by no means uncommon in Roaring Camp, but a birth was a new thing.  People had been dismissed the camp effectively, finally, and with no possibility of return; but this was the first time that anybody had been introduced ab initio.  Hence the excitement.