did not reach Bret Harte until sometime after that sad event.

When word of the passing of "The Master," as he reverently styled him,
reached Bret Harte he was in San Rafael. He immediately sent a dispatch
across the bay to San Francisco to hold back the forthcoming publication
of his "Overland Monthly" for twenty-four hours, and ere that time had
elapsed the poetic tribute to which the title was given of "Dickens in
Camp" had been composed and sent on its way to magazine headquarters
in the Western metropolis. That was in July, 1870.

Late in the '70s, while on his way to a consulship in Germany, Bret
Harte visited London for the first time. There he was taken in charge
by Joaquin Miller, the Poet of the Sierras, who in his reminiscences
relates: "He could not rest until he stood by the grave of Dickens.
At last one twilight I led him by the hand to where some plain letters
in a broad, flat stone just below the bust of Thackeray read 'Charles
Dickens.' Bret Harte is dead now and it will not hurt him in politics,
where they seem to want the hard and heartless for high places, it will
not hurt him in politics nor in anything anywhere to tell the plain
truth, how he tried to speak but choked up, how tears ran down and fell
on the stone as he bowed his bare head very low, how his hand trembled
as I led him away."

Many years later, in May, 1890, Bret Harte, in response to a request
for a facsimile of the original manuscript of "Dickens in Camp" replied
in part:

"I hurriedly sent the first and only draft of the verses to the office
at San Francisco, and I suppose after passing the printer's and
proof-reader's hands it lapsed into the usual oblivion of all editorial