a certain heroic Greek poetry,” and sooner or later it was sure to find its poet.  During the war California remained loyal to the Union, but was too far from the seat of conflict to experience any serious disturbance, and went on independently developing its own resources and becoming daily more civilized.  By 1868 San Francisco had a literary magazine, the Overland Monthly, which ran until 1875, and was revived in 1883.  It had a decided local flavor, and the vignette on its title-page was a happily chosen emblem, representing a grizzly bear crossing a railway track.  In an early number of the Overland was a story entitled the Luck of Roaring Camp, by Francis Bret Harte, a native of Albany, N. Y. (1835), who had come to California at the age of seventeen, in time to catch the unique aspects of the life of the Forty-niners, before their vagabond communities had settled down into the law-abiding society of the present day.  His first contribution was followed by other stories and sketches of a similar kind, such as the Outcasts of Poker Flat, Miggles, and Tennessee’s Partner; and by verses, serious and humorous, of which last, Plain Language from Truthful James, better known as the Heathen Chinee, made an immediate hit, and carried its author’s name into every corner of the English-speaking world.  In 1871 he published a collection of his tales, another of his poems, and a volume of very clever parodies, Condensed Novels, which rank with Thackeray’s Novels by Eminent Hands.  Bret Harte’s California stories were vivid, highly colored pictures of life in the mining camps and raw towns of the Pacific coast.  The pathetic and the grotesque went hand in hand in them, and the author aimed to show how even in the desperate characters gathered together there—­the fortune-hunters, gamblers, thieves, murderers, drunkards, and prostitutes—­the latent nobility of human nature asserted itself in acts of heroism, magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and touching fidelity.  The same men who cheated at cards and shot each another down with tipsy curses were capable on occasion of the most romantic generosity and the most delicate chivalry.  Critics were not wanting who held that, in the matter of dialect and manners and other details, the narrator was not true to the facts.  This was a comparatively unimportant charge; but a more serious question was the doubt whether his characters were essentially true to human nature; whether the wild soil of revenge and greed and dissolute living ever yields such flowers of devotion as blossom in Tennessee’s Partner and the Outcasts of Poker Flat.  However this may be, there is no question as to Harte’s power as a narrator.  His short stories are skillfully constructed and effectively told.  They never drag, and are never overladen with description, reflection, or other lumber.