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rubbed out, and now it is my belief that there isn't a single male human being in America who is honest. I held the belt all alone, until last January. Then I went down, with Rockefeller and Carnegie and a group of Goulds and Vanderbilts and other professional grafters, and swore off my taxes like the most conscienceless of the lot. I was a great loss to America, because I was irreplaceable. It is my belief that it will take fifty years to produce my successor. I believe the entire population of the United States-exclusive of the women -to be rotten, as far as the dollar is concerned. Understand, I am saying these things as a dead person. I should consider it indiscreet in any live one to make these remarks publicly.

But, as I was saying, I was loftier forty years ago than I am now, and I felt a deep shame in being situated as I was slave of such a journal as the Morning Call. If I had been still loftier I would have thrown up my berth and gone out and starved, like any other hero. But I had never had any experience. I had dreamed heroism, like everybody, but I had had no practice, and I didn't know how to begin. I couldn't bear to begin with starving. I had already come near to that once or twice in my life, and got no real enjoyment out of remembering about it. I knew I couldn't get another berth if I resigned. I knew it perfectly well. Therefore I swallowed my humiliation and stayed where I was. whereas there had been little enough interest attaching to my industries before, there was none at all now. I continued my work, but I took not the least interest in it, and naturally there were results. I got to neglecting it. As I have said, there was too much of it for one man. The way I was conducting it now, there was apparently work enough in it for two or three. Even Barnes noticed that, and told me to get an assistant, on half wages. There was a great hulking creature down in the counting roomgood-natured, obliging, unintellectual and he was getting little or nothing a

VOL. CXLIV.-No. 862.-58

But,

week and boarding himself. A graceless boy of the counting-room force who had no reverence for anybody or anything, was always making fun of this beachcomber, and he had a name for him which somehow seemed intensely apt and descriptive-I don't know why. He called him Smiggy McGlural. I offered the berth of assistant to Smiggy, and he accepted it with alacrity and gratitude. He went at his work with ten times the energy that was left in me. He was not intellectual, but mentality was not required or needed in a Morning Call reporter, and so he conducted his office to perfection. I gradually got to leaving more and more of the work to McGlural. I grew lazier and lazier, and within thirty days he was doing almost the whole of it. It was also plain that he could accomplish the whole of it, and more, all by himself, and therefore had no real need of me.

It was at this crucial moment that that event happened which I mentioned awhile ago. Mr. Barnes discharged me. He did not discharge me rudely. It was not in his nature to do that. He was a large, handsome man, with a kindly face and courteous ways, and was faultless in his dress. He could not have said a rude, ungentle thing to anybody. He took me privately aside and advised me to resign. It was like a father advising a son for his good, and I obeyed.

I was on the world, now, with nowhere to go. By my Presbyterian training I knew that the Morning Call had brought disaster upon itself. I knew the ways of Providence, and I knew that this offense would have to be answered for. I could not foresee when the penalty would fall nor what shape it would take, but I was as certain that it would come, sooner or later, as I was of my own existence. I could not tell whether it would fall upon Barnes or upon his newspaper. But Barnes was the guilty one, and I knew, by my training, that the punishment always falls upon the innocent one, consequently I felt sure that it was the newspaper that at some

future day would suffer for Barnes's crime.

Sure enough! Among the very first pictures that arrived, in the fourth week of April-there stood the Morning Call building towering out of the wrecked city, like a Washington Monument; and the body of it was all gone, and nothing was left but the iron bones! It was then that I said, "How wonderful are the ways of Providence!" I had known it would happen. I had known it for forty years. I had never lost my confidence in Providence during all that time. It was put off longer than I was expecting, but it was now comprehensive and satisfactory enough to make up for that.

In those ancient times the counting room of the Morning Call was on the ground floor; the office of the superintendent of the United States Mint was on the next floor above, with Bret Harte as private secretary of the superintendent. The quarters of the editorial staff and the reporter were on the third floor, and the composing room on the fourth and final floor. I spent a good deal of time with Bret Harte in his office after Smiggy McGlural came, but not before that. Harte was doing a good deal of writing for the Californian-contributing "Condensed Novels" and sketches to it, and also acting as editor, I think. I was a contributor. So was Charles H. Webb, also Prentiss Mulford, also a young lawyer named Hastings, who gave promise of distinguishing himself in literature some day. Charles

Warren Stoddard was a contributor. Ambrose Bierce, who is still writing acceptably for the magazines to-day, was then employed on some paper in San Francisco-the Golden Era, perhaps. We had very good times together-very social and pleasant times. But that was after Smiggy McGlural came to my assistance; there was no leisure before that. Smiggy was a great advantage to me during thirty days. Then he turned into a disaster.

It was Mr. Swain, superintendent of the Mint, who discovered Bret Harte.

Harte had arrived in California in the 'fifties, twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and had wandered up into the surface diggings of the camp at Yreka, a place which had acquired its curious name when in its first days it much needed a name through an accident. There was a bake shop with a canvas sign which had not yet been put up, but had been painted and stretched to dry in such a way that the word bakery, all but the B, showed through and was reversed. A stranger read it wrong end first, Yreka, and supposed that that was the name of the camp. The campers were satisfied with it and adopted it.

Harte taught school in that camp several months. He also edited the weekly rag which was doing duty as a newspaper. He spent a little time also in the pocket mining camp of Jackass Gulch (where I tarried, some years later, during three months.) It was at Yreka and Jackass Gulch that Harte learned to accurately observe and put with photographic exactness on paper the woodland scenery of California and the general country aspects-the stagecoach, its driver and its passengers, and the clothing and general style of the surface miner, the gambler, and their women; and it was also in these places that he learned, without the trouble of observing, all that he didn't know about mining, and how to make it read as if an expert were behind the pen. It was in those places that he also learned how to fascinate Europe and America with the quaint dialect of the miner-a dialect which no man in heaven or earth had ever used until Harte invented it. With Harte it died, but it was no loss. By and by he came to San Francisco. He was a compositor by trade, and got work in the Golden Era office at ten dollars a week.

Harte was paid for setting type only, but he lightened his labors and entertained himself by contributing literature to the paper uninvited. The editor and proprietor, Joe Lawrence, never saw

Harte's manuscripts, because there weren't any. Harte spun his literature out of his head while at work at the case, and set it up as he spun. The Golden Era was ostensibly and ostentatiously a literary paper, but its literature was pretty feeble and sloppy, and only exhibited the literary forms, without really being literary. Mr. Swain, the superintendent of the Mint, noticed a new note in that Golden Era orchestraa new and fresh and spirited note that rose above that orchestra's mumbling confusion and was recognizable as music. He asked Joe Lawrence who the performer was, and Lawrence told him. It seemed to Mr. Swain a shame that Harte should be wasting himself in such a place and on such a pittance, so he took him away, made him bis private secretary on a good salary, with little or nothing to do, and told him to follow his own bent and develop his talent. Harte was willing, and the development began.

Bret Harte was one of the pleasantest men I have ever known. He was also one of the unpleasantest men I have ever known. He was showy, meretricious, insincere; and he constantly advertised these qualities in his dress. He was distinctly pretty, in spite of the fact that his face was badly pitted with smallpox. In the days when he could afford it-and in the days when he couldn't-his clothes always exceeded the fashion by a shade or two. He was always conspicuously a little more intensely fashionable than the fashionablest of the rest of the community. He had good taste in clothes. With all his conspicuousness there was never anything really loud or offensive about them. They always had a single smart little accent, effectively located, and that accent would have distinguished Harte from any other of the ultrafashionables. Oftenest it was his necktie. Always it was of a single color, and intense. Most frequently, perhaps, it was crimson-a flash of flame under his chin; or it was indigo blue, and as hot

and vivid as if one of those splendid and luminous Brazilian butterflies had lighted there. Harte's dainty selfcomplacencies extended to his carriage and gait. His carriage was graceful and easy, his gait was of the mincing sort, but was the right gait for him.

I knew him intimately in the days when he was private secretary on the second floor and I a fading and perishing reporter on the third, with Smiggy McGlural looming doomfully in the near distance. I knew him intimately when he came East five years later, in 1870, to take the editorship of the proposed Lakeside Magazine, Chicago, and crossed the continent through such a prodigious blaze of national interest and excitement that one might have supposed he was the Viceroy of India on a progress, or Halley's comet come again after seventyfive years of lamented absence.

I knew him pretty intimately thenceforth until he crossed the ocean to be consul, first at Crefeld, in Germany, and afterward in Glasgow. He never returned to America.

Harte told me once, when he was spending a business fortnight in my house in Hartford, that his fame was an accident-an accident that he much regretted for a while. He said he had written "The Heathen Chinee" for amusement; then had thrown it into the waste-basket; that presently there was a call for copy to finish out the Overland Monthly and let it get to press. He had nothing else, so he fished the "Chinee" out of the basket and sent that. As we all remember, it created an explosion of delight whose reverberations reached the last confines of Christendom; and Harte's name, from being obscure to invisibility in the one week, was as notorious and as visible, in the next, as if it had been painted on the sky in letters of astronomical magnitude. He regarded this fame as a disaster, because he was already at work on such things as "The Luck of Roaring Camp," and "Tennessee's Partner." In the San Franciscan days Bret Harte was by no

means ashamed when he was praised as being a successful imitator of Dickens in America, a remark which indicates a fact-to wit, that there were a great many people in America, at that time, who were ambitiously and undisguisedly imitating Dickens. His long novel, Gabriel Conroy, is as much like Dickens as if Dickens had written it himself.

It is a pity that we cannot escape from life when we are young. When Bret Harte started East in his new-born glory, thirty-six years ago, with the eyes of the world upon him, he had lived all of his life that was worth living. He was entering upon a career of poverty, debt, bitterness, and a worldwide fame which must have often been odious to him, There was a happy Bret Harte, a contented Bret Harte, an ambitious Bret Harte, a hopeful Bret Harte, a bright,

cheerful, easy-laughing Bret Harte, a Bret Harte to whom it was a bubbling and effervescent joy to be alive. That Bret Harte died in San Francisco. It was the corpse of that Bret Harte that swept in splendor across the continent; that refused to go to the Chicago banquet given in its honor because there had been a breach of etiquette-a carriage had not been sent for it; that resumed its eastward journey, leaving behind the grand scheme of the Lakeside Monthly in sorrowful collapse; that undertook to give all the product of its brain for one year to an Eastern magazine for ten thousand dollars-a stupendous sum in those days-but collected and spent the money before the year was out, and then began a dismal and harassing deathin-life which was to cease only at the grave.

(To be continued)

(Written in 1906)

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THE DEEP PORT OF NORMANDY

BY HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS

A

MONG tourists the English Channel has a bad name. Whoever confesses shamefacedly to the nosy man in the smoking room, "Yes, my first trip abroad," is told that the Atlantic successfully crossed does not mean immunity until the Continent is reached. "You think you can stand it rough? Well, wait till you tackle the Channel, and you see the bow go down, the boat spin, and then slide over." Because of Channel terror most Americans see France first at Calais or Boulogne. The habit of the short crossing is formed for life. As if one couldn't get bowled over in an hour as easily as in three! When you suggest that one does not know the chalk cliffs of Normandy until one has sailed into Dieppe, you are asked how long the passage takes. Seventy-five miles from Newhaven! More than three hours at sea! No, siree, not for me!

Fear of seasickness makes the three exclamations an incontrovertible syllogism. Personally conducted or traveling independently, Americans go from Dover to Calais, from Folkstone to Boulogne. They are a bit let down to find that the falaises of which they have heard so much are not as imposing as the cliffs of the Sussex coast from which they started. Having been able to see the French coast before they boarded the Channel steamer, there was no glamour, no mystery about it. The victims of the beaten path become its slaves. They do not realize that in travel it is the same as in other pursuits-the choicest is not always conveniently at hand, thrusting itself in your way at each step. Who seeks finds. How often is one told that the cliffs of Normandy, the much-sung falaises, are "not so much, after all." But they have not seen

the falaises of song and story, which are not at Calais or Boulogne. And they have always missed experiencing the perfect approach to France.

A youngster whose way of getting to the Exposition of 1900 was by cattle ship walked from Liverpool to London to save the pound sterling he had earned mucking out stalls. He had no choice. Newhaven-Dieppe was the only route to Paris within the means of the possessor of sixteen shillings and sixpence. (For three-and-six had gone to meals and lodgings across England.) How the

Channel behaved I do not remember. But I do remember coming suddenly out of the sea upon a wall of land whiter than the waves which dashed against it— a solid wall that showed no opening until we were close upon it, then the narrow cliff-bound entrance, a sharp bend, and the steamer docking at a jetty on which the Paris train was waiting. We had seemed to penetrate France through a barrier of falaises as the sun had reached the ocean through a thick mist half an hour earlier, unexpectedly and completely. The first contact with France is a memory as mystical and glorious as it is precious. But I have always regretted that I took the train. Paris could have waited. Paris should have waited. I might never have returned to Dieppe. What a risk I ran!

Up to this point the Artist listened without smile or word. At Simpson's one is tempted by the generous cut off a peripatetic roast to use one's mouth for a single purpose until the plate is clear. For a man who really did not want any lunch, who had declared his intention of skipping lunch to catch the afternoon boat to Calais so he could be home that night, when I ran into him

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