water. How were the Miner's Delight and its associate mines at South Pass "panning out" by this time? The tumult and dangers of the past year along the railroad had been too great to permit of correspondence or other news from anywhere outside the line. There was now no time to study on a point for aim: the Last Chance had collapsed; we could n't sit on the hillside, a deserted family; so we moved with the wind. The road we found on getting farther along was literally lined with people straggling to the same goal. Everbody was enquiring of everybody if he had heard anything from there or anywhere else. On reaching South Pass we found the mines were doing tolerably well, but employing no great number of men. The Smoky Hill railroad was just then the subject of much discussion and golden expecta tion. Its distance lent enchantment, and so readily attracted the many rovers that did not know where to go or what to do with themselves. There again was a point to steer for; so we joined company with a few family teams and started on our long journey. By the time we reached the Point of Rocks station on the Union Pacific we feared a good share of the summer would be spent on the plains; so, to take a helping leap, we chartered two cars, a stock and flat car for Laramie City. There our disjointed wagons were soon put in readiness for the road, and our mule train was again under way. The Sioux Indians were not harmless, at that time. Out a mile or two and we were halted by Uncle Sam. The military authorities at Fort Sanders cogitated a while on the advisability of letting so small a train of teams pass. But every gun, real and imaginary, was brought forth, and its "sure shot" qualities so praised, and our amunition mentioned as so voluminous, that we were set free to take our chances. When we resumed our journey I felt a pride in manipulating my own little prairie boat, that is not easily described; for though I was a widow, I was yet but a child, and to own the two little animals was a joy that monopolized my mind, and even disturbed my sleep. We drove up Cherry Creek and on southeast till we reached Phil Sheridan, Kansas. There had been a halt in the further building of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, and the contractors were just building their camps along the surveyed line preparatory to beginning grade work. The prospects were looking tame compared with our former railroad experience, we thought. It would cost something to get stove, paraphernalia, and provisions, etc., out from St. Louis; better think awhile and take notes before making a useless expenditure. We would probably get ready labor for our teams; yet in case of failing to find a point of business advantage, our income from this source would be too limited to detain us. However, we were getting quite used to the handling of our mules, in and out of harness. We were independent, and could hitch up any day and go whichever way the wind might chance to blow. Why not? We were in one of our speculative moods. We were just the kind of women, too, to take some absurd freak. What should it be? We were almost ready to hitch up again and start. The camp, however, did liven up a trifle on beginning work, and laborers and teams were coming in daily. We had simply been a little ahead of time. Our teams were put on at a clear profit of two dollars and fifty cents each per day, and a contractor, Mr. Conway, persuaded us to take charge of his boarding house at a salary of one hundred and fifty dollars a month, he supplying tents, provisions, and all the necessaries. The number of boarders ranged from forty to fifty laborers with ravenous appetitesand we had earnest work on our hands, as though we were at liberty to do so, we preferred not to share our salary with a third. party. And here it was that Fido disappeared. Poor Fido! He had shared our hardships and our vigilance in daylight and dark. His bright eyes had spoken his appreciation and sympathy to us a thousand times, his pink tongue had kissed our hands daily in token of his love. He had been our staunch friend, rain or shine, outdoors or under the shelter of the airy tent. Why should we not mourn his loss? The camp was so quiet, the men so sober and orderly, that for anything startling to happen seemed out of the question. Yet the second day after our return from St. Louis, we were brought face to face with one of the many sad endings of sad stories in which the West abounds. We sat reading in the early afternoon in the shade of our canvas, when the cook came running from one of the smaller tents, screaming and gesticulating frantically. The laborers had just gone to their afternoon duties, but heard her and saw that something was wrong. Her husband and the contractor came to her rescue immediately. Somebody had hung himself to the ridgepole of his tent. He had been to the kitchen ten minutes before to ask a favor, and she had gone to take him the trifle. The man was cut down, yet nothing was done to restore him to consciousness. We suggested cutting a vein to start circulation, but Mr. Jones thought suicides ought to be left alone. The man was lately from the States. He had come shaking with ague and unable to work. He had tried the shovel several mornings and given it up. The contractor had that morning ordered him to leave the camp; and as a climax to these ills he had just received a letter from his wife in Indiana, with an account of illness and need. The men who had taken him into their tent, did not want the presence of a corpse to disturb their night's rest, so a shallow hole was dug on the hill, and rolled in a mule blanket he was buried at sunset, while yet warm. And mother earth was as unkind to him as had been the fates in life. There was no place for him even We passed his hastily made After two months at Conway's camp, we concluded to venture into business. A trip to St. Louis for fixtures, provisions, and so forth, was the next thing in order. From Sheridan, east, habitations were only seen at stations. The country was one vast plain of coarse grass with miniature valleys made by buffalo and known as buffalo-wallows. As the train sped on, it flanked an enormous herd of these animals. To our left the land fairly swarmed with them. Those grazing near the track, though they took little notice of the engine's approach, suddenly started on beside it in a breakneck speed. Soon a hundred or more were galloping along the entire length of the train. They were doubtless intent on heading it off. They kept up this even race for some miles until they fell back from exhaustion. One old fellow fairly leaped the pilot; he bounded over the track so near the engine that we held our breath, waiting for the shock. that seemed inevitable. There too we had an instance of the wanton savagery in human nature. Many passengers in the three cars had guns. These were used in rapid repetition through the open windows. game was within a few yards, and many of the buffaloes were wounded to satisfy a savage instinct. Who cared that these harmless animals should suffer for weeks and months from the wounds so wantonly inflict- burying place the following day - the coyotes ed, perhaps to succumbto them at last? The in his grave. had found it. Dagmar Mariager. RECENT FICTION. III. WHATEVER Bret Harte is willing to write, California must read. It has read The Crusade of the Excelsior with very much of the old pleasure, and it must be confessed, something of a new pain. The touch is of a hand that has not vanished, but is gloved; the sound is of a voice that is not still, but does quaver. We have loved so much the art that was indistinguishable from nature in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Tennessee's Partner, that we fear to take up any new workings, lest it have become dulled by years, or lassitude, or the abrasion of society. The Crusade realizes every hope and fear. There is the same virile beauty of style, the old interpenetrating pathos, the familiar surprises of humor; but they are all too discrete now, and lack the fascination of a shining chain. And when one reads such thither English as "exundating sea," he must ask himself with a perplexity that is fruitless, what was the word that the devil who presides over the typography has so distorted? Or did the familiar who inspires the left lobes of the brains of Oscar Wilde and of Walt Whitman indulge himself with temporary leave of absence? If so, he returned quickly, content with one victory. Harte's story is of the good ship Excelsior, which runs into a perennial fog bank off the coast of Lower California, and is borne by an ocean current into the harbor of Todos Santos. It is a harbor withdrawn from the world by the fog, so that for scores of years it has not been visited by any ship. mystery is not explained why the people of Todos Santos did not sail out of the harbor, as they easily could, though no ship would The The Crusade of the Excelsior. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. 1887. For sale in San Francisco by Chilion Beach. enter except by accident. Enough that here is a Mexican gente de razon, petrified in the customs of ninety years ago, and so content with their afternoon life as to care not at all for anything new. But they are surprised, and fraternize with the American officers of the Excelsior and her passengers. The ship is carried off by a mutiny, and for eight months the passengers are incorporated in various relations with the people of Todos Santos. A bit of tragedy closes the variegated plot. Through it all is recognized the familiar and pleasant cunning of the hand that holds the pen. One wishes it did not shake so often. It would be pleasanter if the continual fog that shrouds Todos Santos had not as thoroughly penetrated the story and made the characters seem larger than they were, moving in a misty way to do things that no one ever thinks to do under a clear sky. But of course this fringe of unreality makes for the author an opportunity to dance his puppets in a more humorous way. This he does with a skill that inspires pleasure. Mr. Incoul's Misadventure2 is a cheerless treatment of the grand passion. It is very much such a pessimistic novel as might be expected from Edgar Saltus, after he had educated himself along to it by writing "The Philosophy of Disenchantment" and "The Anatomy of Negation." A hopeless man, who has lived beyond the turning year of his life before which "trust in all things high came easy to his soul," prostrates his work and himself upon it. So our pessimist is able to see only the external of beauty, and even while he paints it with rare delicacy of touch is blind to the possibility of 2 Mr. Incoul's Misadventure. By Edgar Saltus. New York Benjamin & Bell. 1857. an inner virtue penetrating through to the beauty with its own warmth. His Maida, the heroine, is a passion-flower of perfected delicacy. So heroic is she in dismissing her lover and giving herself to the middle-aged Mr. Incoul, making the marriage-conditions that Balzac puts into the mouth of Eugenie Grandet, that the reader is sure he will find no change in this charming life, until perhaps the moment arrives, as she half-promised her unloved lover "When that day comes, believe me,' she said, and her delicious face took on a richer hue, 'when that day comes there will be neither asking nor giving: we shall have come into our own."" Suddenly, under the most elaborate and inoffensive guarding of words, the impossible seems to become a fact. But it is not perfectly clear. Either she was innocent, or the author, who suggests but does not say that she is not, has created a woman who cannot exist. She is not one person. This is the great failure of his art. Another and a lesser one, for it goes only to style, is that he tells the story with the same witty exaggerations in the text of its narration as in its conversations. A graceful, unreasonable largeness of words is the saliency in quick talk, and if we do not hear it there, we say that one is not modern in the interplay of words. But what is easy brightness in conversation is a conscious effort in narration, and is obviously misplaced. Otherwise—that is, as to still smaller things the writing in this book is very good. Mr. Saltus is mentally refined and pared ad unguem. His perception of the necessary in each shifting situation is admirable; he is as agile as the good talker who answers a question by its meaning more than by its words. His English is very good; his quietly powerful treatment of love and silent, cruel jealousy is perfect. If only he had not stripped himself so much of what still lives in humanity! A Mr. Ludlow-whose previous achievement in historic literature has been a "concentric chart of History"-gives us a romance of the fifteenth century, called The Captain of the Janizaries'. It proves to be both a readable story and a suggestive and interesting bit of history. The hero is George Castriot better known as Scanderbeg; and it is granting to the romance one of the chief virtues of historic fiction when we say that on laying it down the reader finds himself disposed to go to a library and search out all he can find about the Albanian patriot. Mr. Ludlow does not slur over the dark spots in his hero's career- the treason to the Sultan, who loved and trusted him, the two or three cold-blooded murders, when these became necessary to his plan; but he makes evident the absolute patriotism of the nor is it easy to see how he could have been true to Albania without being false to Amurath. The story deals chiefly, like other historic fictions, with the adventures of minor characters, whose fates are intertwined with those of the chieftain; but these adventures are so disposed as to bring in — and in a pleasant manner, not overloaded with instruction - as much as possible of the happenings and ways of the time in Servia, Albania, and Constantinople. man The lady who over the signature of "Sophie May" has given to children that perennial treasure, the "Prudy books," and who has also written some pleasant books for young girls, now essays a regular grown-up novel, which she calls Drones' Honey. It limps a little in plot perhaps; but it is good enough not in the least to discredit her; good enough to leave the reader touched and made thoughtful as he lays it down, and for some time afterward. Two sweet and noble young women - the one beloved, "The Captain of the Janizaries. A story of the times of Scanderbeg and the fall of Constantinople. By James M. Ludlow. New York: Funk & Wagnalís. 1887. Drones' Honey. By Sophie May. Boston: Lee & Shepard. 1887. For sale in San Francisco by Samuel Carson & Co. the other not; the friendship existing between such women (rarer, but no less possible than the like magnanimous relation between men): these are the main figures, and the main topic; for the young man whom love leads to abjure "drones' honey" and become a worker in the world, is rather a figure-head, though an appropriate and effective one. Narransauc, the Maine village, is delightfully sketched. The Devil's Hat, The Blind Brother, Cashel Byron's Profession, 7 to 12, and The Jesuit's Ring," do not call for much notice. The Devil's Hat is a story of the Pennsylvania oil regions, overflowing with local color; indeed, the story-which is slight enough, but told with intelligence and good-breeding, and quite out of the ordinary line in plot - seems used chiefly as an excuse for descriptions of oil-mining, like the descriptive serials of travel or so forth in the magazines. The title does not indicate any Satanic legend in the story; the "Devil's Hat" was only the name given to a hat-shaped hill, in which the hero of the story sunk his oil well. The Blind Brother is also a Pennsylvania story - this time of coal-mining, strikes, and Molly Maguires. It is rather a boys' story than a novel, and is of fair merit in that capacity, but no more. Cashel Byron's Profession is one of the Harpers' English reprints, and an uncommonly disagreeable story, in which the heroine, who is the very flower of high civilization, marries deliberately a prizefighter and the author approves her choice, and makes the match turn out well. This tale is made acceptable to English ears polite by making the prize-fighter ultimately fall. 'The Devil's Hat. By Melville Philips. Boston: Ticknor & Co. 1887. For sale in San Francisco by Samuel Carson & Co. 2 The Blind Brother. By Homer Greene. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. Cashel Byron's Profession. By George Bernard Shaw. New York: Harper Brothers. 1886. 47 to 12. By the author of the Leavenworth Case. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1887. 5 The Jesuit's Ring. A Romance of Mount Desert. By Augustus Allen Hayes. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1887. For sale in San Francisco by The Bancroft Co. heir to a title. In spite of its offensive and impossible conclusion, the story is told with unusual intelligence, and the heroine's conversation is really, as represented, very clever. 7 to 12 is a little detective story, the merest trifle, by which a half hour of waiting at a station might be whiled away - rather ingenious, and entirely free from unpleasant qualities, but of no value. The Jesuit's Ring, on the other hand, is distinctly second-rate and foolish. It has a pretty plot, too, which it is a pity to see spoiled. In brief, a Jesuit missionary, in search of Norembega, wears an ancient ring that gives its wearer success in his dearest hope. His dearest hope was to die for the cause he represented, on the soil where his work lay; and accordingly he is slain in Argall's attacks upon the French station of St. Sauveur. It is the property of the ring always to lose itself at once upon passing into the possession of an unworthy person, and stay lost until some worthy one seeks it. Accordingly, it slips from the pocket of the English sailor who captures it, and for about two centuries lies hid on the site of the French colony, near Bar Harbor, till a nineteenth century knight, a summer sojourner at Mount Desert, finds it, and puts it on the finger of his sweetheart. The story of the Jesuit Du Thet is prettily enough told; but when the modern is reached, the whole telling becomes hopelessly weak. The grand society is seen so much as the reporter who figures in the story might have seen it, that one cannot resist the suspicion that the oftquoted "Robert C-, of The Universe" is actually the author. Collections of short stories seem to be coming more into favor within two or three years. If we remember rightly, publishers had for some time looked upon such collections as undesirable ventures, when the Scribners undertook their series of "Short Stories from American Authors" - which series either marked or caused the turn of the tide in popular demand, or in publish |