which had already found free
expression in the journals named. An eager ambition to lift all the new
life of the Pacific into a recognized place in the world of letters made
the young men we have named put their wits together in a monthly
magazine which should rival the Atlantic in Boston and Blackwood in
Edinburgh. The name was easily had, and for a sign manual on the cover
some one drew a grizzly bear, that formidable exemplar of Californian
wildness. But the design did not quite satisfy, until Bret Harte, with
a felicitous stroke, drew two parallel lines just before the feet of the
halting brute. Now it was the grizzly of the wilderness drawing back
before the railway of civilization, and the picture was complete as an
emblem.

Bret Harte became, by the common urgency of his companions, the first
editor of the Overland, and at once his own tales and poems began, and
in the second number appeared "The Luck of Roaring Camp," which
instantly brought him wide fame. In a few months he found himself
besought for poems and articles, sketches and stories, in influential
magazines, and in 1871 he turned away from the Pacific coast, and took
up his residence, first in New York, afterward in Boston.

"No one," says his old friend, Mr. Stoddard, "who knows Mr. Harte, and
knew the California of his day, wonders that he left it as he did.
Eastern editors were crying for his work. Cities vied with one another
in the offer of tempting bait. When he turned his back on San
Francisco, and started for Boston, he began a tour that the greatest
author of any age might have been proud of. It was a veritable ovation
that swelled from sea to sea: the classic sheep was sacrificed all along
the route. I have often thought that if Bret Harte had met with a fatal
accident during that transcontinental journey, the world would have
declared with one voice that the greatest genius of his time was lost to
it."

In Boston he entered into an arrangement with the predecessors of the
publishers of this volume, and his contributions appeared in their
periodicals and were gathered into volumes. The arrangement in one form
or another continued to the time of his death, and has for witness a
stately array of comely volumes; but the prose has far outstripped the
poetry. There are few writers of Mr. Harte's prodigality of nature who
have used with so much fine reserve their faculty for melodious verse,
and the present volume contains the entire