And in that hour he looked fearlessly into the gulf which separates the New World from the Old.  He had hoped to bridge it; but, alas! it can not be bridged.

THE IDYL OF RED GULCH
---------------------
BY BRET HARTE

Francis Bret Harte (born at Albany, N. Y., August 25, 1839; died in 1902) wrought a revolution in the art of story-writing by his California tale, “The Luck of Roaring Camp” which appeared in 1868 in the second number of “The Overland Monthly,” of which Harte was editor.  This was followed by a number of stories of the same original quality, such as “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” and “The Idyl of Red Gulch,” concerning which Parke Godwin wrote in “Putnam’s Magazine,” 1870:  “Bret Harte has deepened and broadened our literary and moral sympathies; he has broken the sway of the artificial and conventional; he has substituted actualities for idealities—­but actualities that manifest the grandeur of self-sacrifice, the beauty of love, the power of childhood, and the ascendency of nature."

THE IDYL OF RED GULCH
BY BRET HARTE
[Footnote:  Copyright, 1899, by Bret Harte.  Published by special
arrangement with Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., publishers of Mr.
Harte’s works.]

Sandy was very drunk.  He was lying under an azalea-bush, in pretty much the same attitude in which he had fallen some hours before.  How long he had been lying there he could not tell, and didn’t care; how long he should lie there was a matter equally indefinite and unconsidered.  A tranquil philosophy, born of his physical condition, suffused and saturated his moral being.

The spectacle of a drunken man, and of this drunken man in particular, was not, I grieve to say, of sufficient novelty in Red Gulch to attract attention.  Earlier in the day some local satirist had erected a temporary tombstone at Sandy’s head, bearing the inscription, “Effects of McCorkle’s whiskey—­kills at forty rods,” with a hand pointing to McCorkle’s saloon.  But this, I imagine, was, like most local satire, personal; and was a reflection upon the unfairness of the process rather than a commentary upon the impropriety of the result.  With this facetious exception, Sandy had been undisturbed.  A wandering mule, released from his pack, had cropped the scant herbage beside him, and sniffed curiously at the prostrate man; a vagabond dog, with that deep sympathy which the species have for drunken men, had licked his dusty boots and curled himself up at his feet, and lay there, blinking one eye in the sunlight, with a simulation of dissipation that was ingenious and dog-like in its implied flattery of the unconscious man beside him.

Meanwhile the shadows of the pine-trees had slowly swung around until they crossed the road, and their trunks barred the open meadow with gigantic parallels of black and yellow.  Little puffs of red dust, lifted by the plunging hoofs of passing teams, dispersed in a grimy shower upon the recumbent man.  The sun sank lower and lower, and still Sandy stirred not.  And then the repose of this philosopher was disturbed, as other philosophers have been, by the intrusion of an unphilosophical sex.