stern humor and was developed by the
circumstances that surrounded him. Many of his short stories are
models. They contain not a superfluous word, they handle a single
incident with grapic power, they close without moral or comment. The
form came as a natural evolution from his limitations and powers. With
him the story must of necessity be brief.... Bret Harte was the artist
of impulse, the painter of single burning moments, the flashlight
photographer who caught in lurid detail one dramatic episode in the
life of a man or a community and left the rest in darkness."[4]

Harte's humor is mostly "Western humor" There is not always uproarious
merriment, but there is a constant background of humor. I know of no
more amusing scene in American literature than that in the courtroom
when the Colonel gives his version of the deacon's method of signaling
to the widow in Harte's story included in the present volume, _Colonel
Starbottle for the Plaintiff_. Here is part of it:

"True to the instructions she had received from him, her lips part in
the musical utterance (the Colonel lowered his voice in a faint
falsetto, presumably in fond imitation of his fair client) 'Kerree!'
Instantly the night becomes resonant with the impassioned reply (the
Colonel here lifted his voice in stentorian tones), 'Kerrow!' Again,
as he passes, rises the soft 'Kerree!'; again, as his form is lost in
the distance, comes back the deep 'Kerrow!'"

While Harte's stories all have in them a certain element or background
of humor, yet perhaps the majority of them are chiefly romantic or
dramatic even more than they are humorous.

Among the best of his short stories may be mentioned: _The Luck of
Roaring Camp_ (August, 1868, _Overland_), _The Outcasts of Poker Flat_
(January, 1869, _Overland_), _Tennessee's Partner_ (October, 1869,
_Overland_), _Brown of Calaveras_ (March, 1870, _Overland_), _Flip: a
California Romance_ (in _Flip, and Other Stories_, 1882), _Left Out on
Lone Star Mountain_ (January, 1884, _Longman's_), _An Ingenue of the
Sierras_ (July, 1894, _McClure's_), _The Bell-Ringer of Angel's_ (in
_The Bell-Ringer of Angel's, and Other Stories_, 1894), _Chu Chu_ (in
_The Bell-Ringer of Angel's, and Other Stories_, 1894), _The Man and
the Mountain_ (in _The Ancestors of Peter Atherly, and Other Tales_,
1897), _Salomy Jane's Kiss_ (in _Stories in Light and Shadow_, 1898),
_The Youngest Miss Piper_ (February, 1900, _Leslie's Monthly_),
_Colonel Star