to establish the chronology of the sketches, and incidentally to show
that what are considered the "happy accidents" of literature are very
apt to be the results of quite logical and often prosaic processes.

The author's _first_ volume was published in 1865 in a thin book
of verse, containing, besides the titular poem, "The Lost Galleon,"
various patriotic contributions to the lyrics of the Civil War, then
raging, and certain better known humorous pieces, which have been
hitherto interspersed with his later poems in separate volumes, but
are now restored to their former companionship. This was followed in
1867 by "The Condensed Novels," originally contributed to the "San
Francisco Californian," a journal then edited by the author, and a
number of local sketches entitled "Bohemian Papers," making a single
not very plethoric volume, the author's first book of prose. But he
deems it worthy of consideration that during this period, i.e. from
1862 to 1866, he produced "The Society upon the Stanislaus" and "The
Story of M'liss,"--the first a dialectical poem, the second a
Californian romance,--his first efforts toward indicating a peculiarly
characteristic Western American literature. He would like to offer
these facts as evidence of his very early, half-boyish but very
enthusiastic belief in such a possibility,--a belief which never
deserted him, and which, a few years later, from the better-known
pages of "The Overland Monthly," he was able to demonstrate to a
larger and more cosmopolitan audience in the story of "The Luck of
Roaring Camp" and the poem of the "Heathen Chinee." But it was one of
the anomalies of the very condition of life that he worked amidst, and
endeavored to portray, that these first efforts were rewarded by very
little success; and, as he will presently show, even "The Luck of
Roaring Camp" depended for its recognition in California upon its
success elsewhere. Hence the critical reader will observe that the