itself presented the singular spectacle of a patriarchal Latin race
who had been left to themselves, forgotten by the world, for nearly
three hundred years. The faith, courage, vigor, youth, and capacity
for adventure necessary to this emigration produced a body of men as
strongly distinctive as the companions of Jason. Unlike most pioneers,
the majority were men of profession and education; all were young, and
all had staked their future in the enterprise. Critics who have taken
large and exhaustive views of mankind and society from club windows in
Pall Mall or the Fifth Avenue can only accept for granted the
turbulent chivalry that thronged the streets of San Francisco in the
gala days of her youth, and must read the blazon of their deeds like
the doubtful quarterings of the shield of Amadis de Gaul. The author
has been frequently asked if such and such incidents were real,--if he
had ever met such and such characters. To this he must return the one
answer, that in only a single instance was he conscious of drawing
purely from his imagination and fancy for a character and a logical
succession of incidents drawn therefrom. A few weeks after his story
was published, he received a letter, authentically signed, _correcting
some of the minor details of his facts_ (!), and enclosing as
corroborative evidence a slip from an old newspaper, wherein the main
incident of his supposed fanciful creation was recorded with a
largeness of statement that far transcended his powers of imagination.

He has been repeatedly cautioned, kindly and unkindly, intelligently
and unintelligently, against his alleged tendency to confuse
recognized standards of morality by extenuating lives of recklessness,
and often criminality, with a single solitary virtue. He might easily
show that he has never written a sermon, that he has never moralized
or commented upon the actions of his heroes, that he has never voiced
a creed or obtrusively demonstrated an ethical opinion. He might