milling industry familiarly; and so whenever Bret Harte
introduces that industry into a story, the first time one of his miners
opens his mouth I recognize from his phrasing that Harte got the phrasing
by listening--like Shakespeare--I mean the Stratford one--not by
experience. No one can talk the quartz dialect correctly without
learning it with pick and shovel and drill and fuse.

I have been a surface-miner--gold--and I know all its mysteries, and the
dialect that belongs with them; and whenever Harte introduces that
industry into a story I know by the phrasing of his characters that
neither he nor they have ever served that trade.

I have been a "pocket" miner--a sort of gold mining not findable in any
but one little spot in the world, so far as I know. I know how, with
horn and water, to find the trail of a pocket and trace it step by step
and stage by stage up the mountain to its source, and find the compact
little nest of yellow metal reposing in its secret home under the ground.
I know the language of that trade, that capricious trade, that
fascinating buried-treasure trade, and can catch any writer who tries to
use it without having learned it by the sweat of his brow and the labor
of his hands.

I know several other trades and the _argot_ that goes with them; and
whenever a person tries to talk the talk peculiar to any of them without
having learned it at its source I can trap him always before he gets far
on his road.

And so, as I have already remarked, if I were required to superintend a
Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, I would narrow the matter down to a single
question--the only one, so far as the previous controversies have
informed me, concerning which illustrious experts of unimpeachable
competency have testified: _Was the author of Shakespeare's Works a
lawyer_?--a lawyer deeply read and of limitless experience? I would put
aside the guesses, and surmises, and perhapses, and might-have-beens, and
could-have beens, and must-have-beens, and we-are
justified-in-presumings, and the rest of those vague spectres and shadows
and indefinitenesses, and stand or fall, win or lose, by the verdict
rendered by the jury upon that single question. If the verdict was Yes,
I should feel quite convinced that the Stratford Shakespeare, the actor,
manager, and trader who died so obscure, so forgotten, so destitute of
even village consequence that sixty years afterward no fellow-citizen and
friend of his later days