an and what sort of training had led
to it.

Causes are not easily determined, but they exist and function. Accidents
rarely if ever happen. Heredity and experience very largely account for
results. What is their testimony in this particular case?

Francis Bret Harte was born in Albany, New York, February 25, 1836. His
father was a highly educated instructor in Greek, of English-Jewish
descent. His mother was an Ostrander, a cultivated and fine character of
Dutch descent. His grandmother on his father's side was Catherine Brett.
He had an elder brother and two younger sisters. The boys were voracious
readers and began Shakespeare when six, adding Dickens at seven. Frank
developed an early sense of humor, burlesquing the baldness of his
primer and mimicking the recitations of some of his fellow pupils when
he entered school. He was studious and very soon began to write. At
eleven he sent a poem to a weekly paper and was a little proud when he
showed it to the family in print. When they heartlessly pointed out its
flaws he was less hilarious.

His father died when he was very young and he owed his training to his
mother. He left school at thirteen and was first a lawyer's clerk and
later found work in a counting-room. He was self-supporting at sixteen.
In 1853 his mother married Colonel Andrew Williams, an early mayor of
Oakland, and removed to California. The following year Bret and his
younger sister, Margaret, followed her, arriving in Oakland in March,
1854.

He found the new home pleasant. The relations with his cultivated
stepfather were congenial and cordial, but he suffered the fate of most
untrained boys. He was fairly well educated, but he had no trade or
profession. He was bright and quick, but remunerative employment was not
readily found, and he did not relish a clerkship. For a time he was
given a place in a drugstore. Some of his early experiences are embalmed
in "How Reuben Allen Saw Life" and in "Bohemian Days." In the latter he
says: "I had been there a week,--an idle week, spent in listless outlook
for employment, a full week, in my eager absorption of the strange life
around me and a photographic sensitiveness to certain scenes and
incidents of those days, which stand out in my memory today as freshly
as on the day they impressed me."

It was a satisfaction that he found some congenial work. He wrote for
_Putnam's_ and the _Knickerbocker_.

In 1856, when he was twenty, he went to Alamo, in the S