Excerpt from Stories and Poems, and Other Uncollected Writings Grateful acknowledgment is here made of the cour tesies extended me in the compilation of this volume. To Miss Ina D. Coolbrith, whom Bret Harte termed the sweetest note in California literature, I am indebted for the Dedication Poem, Bret Harte. This is singularly appropriate, since Miss Coolbrith is one of the old guard of letters of the Pacific Coast, one of the coterie of writers which included Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller, and Charles Warren Stoddard, all of whom created literature in those early days which will find an abiding place in the hearts and minds of men for all time. To Robert E. Cowan, of San Francisco, I owe the good fortune of having acquired the rare old files of the Golden Era and some other Cali fornian newspapers. He has from time to time given me valuable and helpful information relative to Bret Harte's early work on the Pacific Coast. I am grateful for the courtesies shown me by Mr. J. L. Gillis, of the State Li brary of California, at Sacramento; Mr. Frederick J. Taggart, Curator of the Academy of Pacific Coast History, Berkeley, California; the authorities of the Library of Congress, Wash ington, D.C., including the Copyright Office, and Mr. Frank P. Hill, of the Brooklyn Public Library. For permission to republish some of the copyrighted material found in this volume, sincere thanks and acknowledgment are due to the following: Mr. William Heinemann and Mrs. T. Edgar Pemberton, of England; Houghton Mithin Company; Cen tury Company; Harper Bros.; Charles Scribner's Sons; the Sun, New York; the Critic (now Putnam's Magazine); the Cosmopolitan Magazine; the American Magazine the. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.