established. Of all that group of brilliant young men who visited the mines in early days, which included for a brief space "Orpheus C. Kerr" and "Artemus Ward," I can well imagine that Bret Harte attracted the least attention. It is extremely doubtful to "my mind if he ever had much actual experience of the mining camps. To a man of his vivid imagination, a mere suggestion afforded a plot for a story; even the Laird's Toreadors, it will be recalled, were commercially successful when purely imaginary; he only failed when he subsequently studied the real thing in Spain. Bret Harte was a man who in a primitive community might well escape notice. In appearance, manner and training, he was the exact antithesis of Mark Twain. He was a student before he was a writer and possessed the student's shy reserve. I can well imagine him, a slight boyish figure, flitting from camp to camp, wrapped in his own thoughts, keeping his own counsel. Yet he alone of that little band, unless you except Mark Twain, possessed the divine spark we call "genius." Centuries after the names of all the rest are buried in oblivion, Bret Harte's stories of the Argonauts in the mining towns of California will remain the classics they have already become. Yet as before stated, when once I got fairly started on the road, the pioneers themselves and their worthy descendants absorbed my interest and assumed the center of the stage to the exclusion, for the time being, of the romancers; who, after all, each in his own fashion, depicted only what most appealed to him in the characters of these same men and their contemporaries. Bayard Taylor in his interesting work "El Dorado," the first edition of which appeared in 1850, thus states his opinion of the men of '49: "Abundance of gold does not always beget, as moralists tell us, a grasping and avaricious spirit. The principles of hospitality were as faithfully observed in the rude tents of the diggers, as they could be by the thrifty farmers of the North and West. The cosmopolitan cast of character in California, resulting in the commingling of so many races, and the primitive mode of life, gave a character of good-fellowship to all its members; and in no part of the world have I ever seen help more freely given to the needy, or more ready co-operation in any human proposition. Personally, I can safely say that I never met with such unvarying kindness from comparative strangers." That last sentence also spelt the literal truth in my experience. Even the dogs were kindly disposed and though I carried, a "big stick," except by way of companionship and as an aid in climbing, I might safely have left it at home. And while at times I walked through a wild, mountainous and almost deserted country, the idea of possible danger never occurred to me. When finally one encountered a human being, he invariably proved a courteous, obliging and companionable personage to meet. Bayard Taylor attended in September and the beginning of October, 1849,