warned his
countrymen of the ignominy and disaster of doing wrong.

A BELATED GUEST

It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things finds
compensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries,
of recording his memories of it. This is, in the first two or three
instances, a pleasure. It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by the
fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if the
Absences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people,
they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he
basks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity. But another
time comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to the
pain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievous
obligation. You are unable to choose your company among those immortal
shades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to such
gleams of this 'dolce lome' as your reminiscences can shed upon them?
Then they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms,
that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out such
welcome, great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two or
three instances, if one does one's duty by each. People begin to say,
and not without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this: "Ah,
here he is again with his recollections!" Well, but if the recollections
by some magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of his
as, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at least
excused?

I.

My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlantic
shore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in the
simple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universal
attention and interest which met and followed it. He was indeed a
prince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchanting
art felt a patriotic property, for his promise and performance in those
earliest tales of 'The Luck of Roaring Camp', and 'Tennessee's Partner',
and 'Maggles', and 'The Outcasts of Poker Flat', were the earnests of an
American literature to come. If it is still to come, in great measure,
that is not Harte's fault, for he kept on writing those stories, in one
form or another, as long as he lived. He wrote them first and last in
the spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time could quite help doing,
but he