he
paused and retraced his steps, and again passed the cabin.

It remained for a proof-reader at the Riverside Press to reconstruct
the sentence by deleting the comma after the word "gulch"; thus, "the
gulch past the cabin." That Kentuck "again passed the cabin" seems not
to have been considered. Hence, in the Houghton Mifflin Company's
printings of The Luck of Roaring Camp, the last error is worse than the
first.

These errors are not venial. Those that are such have not been
mentioned, as they occur in almost every book, and appear to be
unavoidable. Other errors, evincing a lack of knowledge of good usage
in book-typography, must also pass unnoticed.

The Luck of Roaring Camp having been disposed of, consideration of Dr.
Royce's review of the Shirley Letters will be resumed.

The Doctor, on page 350 of his work, says, "In her little library she
had a Bible, a prayer-book, Shakespeare, and Lowell's 'Fable for the
Critics,' with two or three other books." Shirley (p. 100, post) says
she had a--

Bible and prayer-book, Shakespeare, Spenser, Coleridge, Shelley,
Keats, Lowell's Fable for Critics, Walton's Complete Angler, and
some Spanish books.

The poet Spenser's name was spelled with a _c_ in the Pioneer, but the
article "the" was not used before "Critics," as in the extract from
Royce,--an unpardonable error in a book printed in Cambridge, and at
the Riverside Press too.

The Spanish books mentioned by Shirley were evidently not neglected by
her, and her acquaintance with and friendship for the Spanish-speaking
population scattered along the banks of the Rio de las Plumas must have
made her very familiar with their tongue. In reading these Letters one
cannot fail to perceive how fittingly Spanish words and phrases are
interwoven with her own English. At the time these Letters were
written, many Spanish words were a part of the California vernacular,
but to Shirley belongs the honor of introducing them into the
literature of California; hence, in printing the Letters, such words
are not italicized, as they usually are, by printers who should know
better.

Dr. Royce also says on page 350, "Prominent in the society of the Bar
was a trapper, of the old Fremont party, who told blood-curdling tales
of Indian fights." (See post, p. 111.) It is singular that the Doctor
has failed to identify this trapper with the well-known James P.
Beckwourth, whose Life and Adventures (Harpers, New York, 1856) was