What makes you star',
You over thar?
Can't a man drop
's glass in yer shop

But you must r'ar?

It wouldn't take

D-d much to break

You and your bar.

Dead!

Poor-little-Jim!

Why, thar was me,
Jones, and Bob Lee,
Harry and Ben,—
No-account men:

Then to take him!

Well, thar-Good-by.
No more, sir-I—
Eh?

What's that you say?
Why, dern it!-sho!-

No? Yes! By Joe!
Sold!

Sold! Why, you limb,

You ornery,

Derned, old, Long-legged Jim.

PLAIN LANGUAGE FROM TRUTHFUL JAMES

(Table Mountain, 1870)

Which I wish to remark,
And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain,
The heathen Chinee is peculiar,

Which the same I would rise to explain.

Ah Sin was his name;

And I shall not deny,

In regard to the same,

What that name might imply;

But his smile it was pensive and childlike,
As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye.

It was August the third,

And quite soft was the skies;
Which it might be inferred

That Ah Sin was likewise;

Yet he played it that day upon William
And me in a way I despise.

Which we had a small game,
And Ah Sin took a hand:

It was Euchre. The same

He did not understand;

But he smiled as he sat by the table,

With a smile that was childlike and bland.

Yet the cards they were stocked
In a way that I grieve,
And my feelings were shocked

At the state of Nye's sleeve,

Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers, And the same with intent to deceive.

But the hands that were played

By that heathen Chinee, And the points that he made,

Were quite frightful to see,

Till at last he put down a right bower, Which the same Nye had dealt unto me!

Then I looked up at Nye,

And he gazed upon me;

And he rose with a sigh,

And said, "Can this be?

We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor,"
And he went for that heathen Chinee.

In the scene that ensued

I did not take a hand,

But the floor it was strewed

Like the leaves on the strand

With the cards that Ah Sin had been hiding, In the game "he did not understand."

In his sleeves, which were long,

He had twenty-four packs,Which was coming it strong,

Yet I state but the facts;

And we found on his nails, which were taper,
What is frequent in tapers,-that's wax.

Which is why I remark,

And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar,—

Which the same I am free to maintain.

Joaquin Miller

Cincinnatus (Heine) Miller, or, to give him the name he adopted, Joaquin Miller, was born in 1841 of immigrant parents. As he himself writes, "My cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west. I was born in a covered wagon, I am told, at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio." When Miller was twelve, his family left the midWest with "two big heavily laden wagons, with eight yoke of oxen to each, a carriage and two horses for mother and baby sister, and a single horse for the three boys to ride." The distance covered in their cross-country exodus (they took a roundabout route to Oregon) was nearly three thousand miles. The time consumed, he records, was seven months and five days. There were no bridges, no railroad levels, nothing of the sort. . . . Many times, at night, after ascending a stream to find a ford, we could look back and see our smouldering campfires of the day before." This journey made a lasting impression on the boy's impressionable mind; it was this tortuous wandering that gave Miller his reverence for the spaciousness and glory of the West in general and the pioneer in particular. After two years in the Oregon home, he ran away to find gold.

At fifteen we find Miller living with the Indians as one of them; in 1859 (at the age of eighteen) he attends a missionschool "college" in Eugene, Oregon; between 1860 and 1865 he is express-messenger, editor of a pacifist newspaper that is suppressed for opposing the Civil War, lawyer and, occasionally, a poet. He holds a minor judgeship from 1866 to 1870.

His first book (Specimens) appears in 1868, his second (Joaquin et al., from which he took his name) in 1869. No response-not even from "the bards of San Francisco Bay" to whom he had dedicated the latter volume. He is chagrined, discouraged, angry. He resolves to quit America, to go to the land that has always been the nursing-ground of poets. "Three months later, September 1, 1870, I was kneeling at the grave of Burns. I really expected to die there in the land of my fathers." He arrives in London, unheralded, unknown. He takes his manuscripts to one publisher after another with the same negative result. Finally, with a pioneer desperation, he prints privately one hundred copies of his Pacific Poems, sending them out for review. Sensation! The reversal of Miller's fortunes is one of the most startling in all literature. He becomes famous overnight. He is fêted, lauded, lionized; he is ranked as an equal of Browning, given a dinner by the Pre-Raphaelites, acclaimed as "the great interpreter of America," "the Bryon of Oregon"!

His dramatic success in England is easily explained. He brought to the calm air of literary London, a breath of the great winds of the plain. The more he exaggerated his crashing effects, the louder he roared, the better the English public liked it. When he entered Victorian parlors in his velvet jacket, hip-boots and flowing hair, childhood visions of the "wild and woolly Westerner" were realized and the very bombast of his work was glorified as typically American.” And yet, for all his overstressed muscularity, Miller is strangely lacking in creative energy. His exuberance and whipped-up rhetoric cannot disguise the essential weakness of It is, in spite of a certain breeziness and a few

his verse.