s poems in dialect we find the same variety of types and
nationalities characteristic of the Pacific coast: the little Mexican
maiden, Pachita, in the old mission garden; the wicked Bill Nye, who
tries to cheat the Heathen Chinee at euchre and to rob Injin Dick of his
winning lottery ticket; the geological society on the Stanislaw who
settle their scientific debates with chunks of old red sandstone and the
skulls of mammoths; the unlucky Mr. Dow, who finally strikes gold while
digging a well, and builds a house with a "coopilow;" and Flynn, of
Virginia, who saves his "pard's" life, at the sacrifice of his own, by
holding up the timbers in the caving tunnel. These poems are mostly in
monologue, like Browning's dramatic lyrics, exclamatory and abrupt in
style, and with a good deal of indicated action, as in _Jim_, where a
miner comes into a bar-room, looking for his old {580} chum, learns that
he is dead, and is just turning away to hide his emotion, when he
recognizes Jim in his informant:

"Well, thar--Good-by--
No more, sir--I--
Eh?
What's that you say?--
Why, dern it!--sho!--
No? Yes! By Jo!
Sold!
Sold! Why, you limb;
You ornery,
Derned old
Long-legged Jim!"

Bret Harte had many imitators, and not only did our newspaper poetry for
a number of years abound in the properties of Californian life, such as
gulches, placers, divides, etc., but writers further east applied his
method to other conditions. Of these by far the most successful was John
Hay, a native of Indiana and private secretary to President Lincoln,
whose _Little Breeches_, _Jim Bludso_, and _Mystery of Gilgal_ have
rivaled Bret Harte's own verses in popularity. In the last-named piece
the reader is given to feel that there is something rather cheerful and
humorous in a bar-room fight which results in "the gals that winter, as a
rule," going "alone to the singing school." In the two former we have
heroes of the Bret Harte type, the same combination of superficial
wickedness with inherent loyalty and tenderness. The profane farmer
{581} of the South-west, who "doesn't pan out on the prophets," and who
had taught his little son "to chaw terbacker, just to keep his milk-teeth
white," but who believes in God and the angels ever since the miraculous
recovery of the same little son when lost on the prairie in a blizzard;
and the unsaintly and bigamistic captain of the _Prairie Belle_, who died
like a hero, holding t