all his own. These gifts shine out in the pages of this book. Here we
find that mustang humor of his forever kicking its silver heels with the
most upsetting suddenness into the honeyed sweetness of his flowing
poetry. Here, too, we find that gift of word-painting which makes all
his writings a brilliant gallery of rich-hued and soft-lighted wonder.
Of the green thickets of the redwood forests he says, in "Primeval
California": "A dense undergrowth of light green foliage caught and held
the sunlight like so much spray." So do Stoddard's pages catch and hold
the lights and shadows of a world which is the more beautiful because he
beheld it and sang of it--for sing he did. His prose is the essence of
poetry.

In my autograph copy of "The Footprints of the Padres" Stoddard wrote:
"A new memory of Old Monterey is the richer for our meeting here for the
first time in the flesh. We have often met in spirit ere this." Whenever
we would go walking together, he and I, through the streets of that old
Monterey, old no longer save in memory, he would invariably take me to a
certain high board fence, and looking through an opening show me the
ruins of an adobe house--nothing but a broken fireplace left, moss-grown
and crumbling away. "That is my old California," he would say, while his
sweet voice was shaken with tears. That desolated hearth seemed to him
the symbol of the California which he had known and loved.... But no,
the old California that Stoddard loved lives on, and will, because he
caught and preserved its spirit and its coloring, its light and life and
music. As the redwood thicket holds the sunlight, so do Stoddard's words
keep bright and living, though viewed through a mist of tears, the
California of other days.

In this new edition of "The Footprints" some changes will be found,
changes which all will agree make an improvement over the original