Bret Harte became, by the common urgency of his companions, the
first editor of the Overland, and at once his own tales and poems
began, and in the second number appeared "The Luck of Roaring Camp,"
which instantly brought him wide fame. In a few months he found
himself besought for poems and articles, sketches and stories, in
influential magazines, and in 1871 he turned away from the Pacific
coast, and took up his residence, first in New York, afterward in
Boston.

"No one," says his old friend, Mr. Stoddard, "who knows Mr. Harte,
and knew the California of his day, wonders that he left it as he
did. Eastern editors were crying for his work. Cities vied with one
another in the offer of tempting bait. When he turned his back on
San Francisco, and started for Boston, he began a tour that the
greatest author of any age might have been proud of. It was a
veritable ovation that swelled from sea to sea: the classic sheep
was sacrificed all along the route. I have often thought that if
Bret Harte had met with a fatal accident during that transcontinental
journey, the world would have declared with one voice that the
greatest genius of his time was lost to it."

In Boston he entered into an arrangement with the predecessors of
the publishers of this volume, and his contributions appeared in
their periodicals and were gathered into volumes. The arrangement
in one form or another continued to the time of his death, and has
for witness a stately array of comely volumes; but the prose has far
outstripped the poetry. There are few writers of Mr. Harte's
prodigality of nature who have used with so much fine reserve their
faculty for melodious verse, and the present volume contains the