wrote them from the life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the air
of the newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the soul of his
fellow-countrymen not only with joy, but with pride such as the
Europeans, who adored him much longer, could never know in him.

When the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host for
Cambridge and the Boston neighborhood, while Harte was still in San
Francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read of
the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage
fell, as if he had perhaps, committed himself in too great an enterprise.
Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this

"Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,"

his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of
attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a
carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco?
Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form, it
must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into Boston
for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded,
and not trust to the horse-car and the local expressman to get him and
his baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous guest.
However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the station,
and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he were not
even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were surely the
most winning in the world. He was then, as always, a child of extreme
fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore in a
mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial
physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and
fascinating thrust of the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead,
then thickly crowned with the black hair which grew early white, while
his mustache remained dark the most enviable and consoling effect
possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying. He
was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first
glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time
could say to him, "Mr. Harte, aren't you afraid to go about in the cars
so recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?" "No, madam," he
could answer in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by
pseudo-pathos, "I bear a charmed life."