, lined with white
cambric.

[The Luck of Roaring Camp, Overland, vol. i, p. 184.] Beside the
low bunk or shelf, on which the figure of the mother was starkly
outlined below the blankets, stood a pine table. On this a
candle-box was placed, and within it, swathed in staring red
flannel, lay the last arrival at Roaring Camp.

Bancroft (History of California, vol. vii, p. 724), speaking of early
California literature, says,--

Mining life in California furnished inexhaustible material;... and
almost every book produced in the golden era gave specimens more or
less entertaining of the wit and humor developed by the struggle
with homelessness, physical suffering, and mental gloom. And when,
perchance, a writer had never heard original tales of the kind he
felt himself expected to relate, he took them at second-hand....
Even the most powerful of Bret Harte's stories borrowed their
incidents from the letters of Mrs. Laura A. K. Clapp, who under the
nom de plume of 'Shirley,' wrote a series of letters published in
the _Pioneer Magazine_, 1851-2. The 'Luck of Roaring Camp' was
suggested by incidents related in Letter II., p. 174-6 of vol. i.
of the _Pioneer_. In Letter XIX., p. 103-10 of vol. iv., is the
suggestion of the 'Outcasts of Poker Flat.' Mrs. Clapp's simple
epistolary style narrates the facts, and Harte's exquisite style
imparts to them the glamour of imagination.

The temptation cannot be resisted, at this point, to pursue the history
of The Luck of Roaring Camp a little further. The reader will kindly
remember that no changes are made in printing extracts. Mr. T. Edgar
Pemberton, in his Bret Harte: A Treatise and a Tribute (London, 1900),
says, in referring to criticism of the story when it was first in
type,--

Mr. Noah Brooks has recorded this strange incident as follows:--

'Perhaps I may be pardoned,' he says, 'for a brief reference to an
odd complication that arose while _The Luck of Roaring Camp_ was
being put into type in the printing office where _The Overland
Monthly_ was prepared for publication. A young lady who served as
proof-reader in the establishment had been somewhat shocked by the
scant morals of the mother of Luck, and when she came to the scene
where Kentuck, after reverently fondling the infant, said, "he
wrastled with my finger, the d----d little cuss," the indignant