teacher, express messenger, printer, and journalist. The types
which live again in his pages are thus not only what he observed,
but what he himself impersonated in his own experience.

He began trying his pen in The Golden Era of San Francisco, where he
was working as a compositor; and when The Californian, edited by
Charles Henry Webb, was started in 1864 as a literary newspaper, he
was one of a group of brilliant young fellows--Mark Twain, Charles
Warren Stoddard, Webb himself, and Prentice Mulford--who gave at
once a new interest in California beside what mining and agriculture
caused. Here in an early number appeared "The Ballad of the Emeu,"
and he contributed many poems, grave and gay, as well as prose in a
great variety of form. At the same time he was appointed Secretary
of the United States Branch Mint at San Francisco, holding the
office till 1870.

But Bret Harte's great opportunity came when The Overland Monthly
was established in 1868 by Anton Roman. This magazine was the
outgrowth of the racy, exuberant literary spirit 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.