1

"Tap! tap! tap!" (to signify "Lay in the leads.")

And away she went, flying up the willow shore, with the whole silver sea of the Mississippi stretching abroad on every hand.

No Amaranth in sight!

"Ha-ha, boys, we took a couple of tricks that time!" said the captain.

And just at that moment a red glare

wheel-and then they closed up with a heavy jolt and locked together tight and fast in the middle of the big river under the flooding moonlight! A roar and a 5 hurrah went up from the crowded decks of both steamers-all hands rushed to the guards to look and shout and gesticulate -the weight careened the vessels over toward each other-officers flew hither 10 and thither cursing and storming, trying to drive the people amidships-both captains were leaning over their railings shaking their fists, swearing and threatening-black volumes of smoke rolled up and canopied the scene, delivering a rain of sparks upon the vessels-two pistol shots rang out, and both captains dodged unhurt and the packed masses of passengers surged back and fell apart while the 20 shrieks of women and children soared above the intolerable din

"That's it! I thought it wasn't any slouch that was running that middle bar in Hog-eye Bend. If it's Wash Hastings -well, what he don't know about the river ain't worth knowing-a regular 15 gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin pilot Wash Hastings is. We won't take any tricks off of him, old man!"

"I wish I'd a stopped for him, that's all."

The Amaranth was within three hundred yards of the Boreas, and still gaining. The "old man" spoke through the tube:

"What is she carrying now?"

"A hundred and sixty-five, sir!" "How's your wood?"

"Pine all out-cypress half gone-eating up cotton-wood like pie!"

And then there was a booming roar, a thundering crash, and the riddled Amaranth dropped loose from her hold and 25 drifted helplessly away!

"Break into that rosin on the main deck 30 --pile it in, the boat can pay for it!"

Soon the boat was plunging and quivering and screaming more madly than ever. But the Amaranth's head was almost abreast the Boreas's stern:

Instantly the fire-doors of the Boreas were thrown open and the men began dashing buckets of water into the furnaces-for it would have been death and destruction to stop the engines with such a head of steam on.

As soon as possible the Boreas dropped down to the floating wreck and took off the dead, the wounded and the unhurt-at 35 least all that could be got at, for the whole forward half of the boat was a shapeless ruin, with the great chimneys lying crossed on top of it, and underneath were a dozen victims imprisoned alive and wailing for help. While men with axes worked with might and main to free these poor fellows, the Boreas's boats went about, picking up stragglers from the river.

40

A hundred and ninety-six and still 45 a-swelling!-water below the middle gauge-cocks!-carrying every pound she can stand-nigger roosting on the safetyvalve !"

"Good! How's your draft?" "Bully! Every time a nigger heaves a stick of wood into the furnace he goes out the chimney with it!"

And now a new horror presented itself. The wreck took fire from the dismantled furnaces! Never did men work with a heartier will than did those stalwart braves with the axes. But it was of no 50 use. The fire ate its way steadily, despising the bucket brigade that fought it. It scorched the clothes, it singed the hair of the axemen-it drove them back, foot by foot-inch by inch-they wavered, struck a final blow in the teeth of the enemy, and surrendered., And as they fell back they heard prisoned voices saying:

The Amaranth drew steadily up till her jack-staff breasted the Boreas's wheel- 55 house-climbed along inch by inch till her chimneys breasted it-crept along, further and further till the boats were wheel to

"Don't leave us! Don't desert us! Don't, don't do it!"

And one poor fellow said:

"I am Henry Worley, striker of the Amaranth! My mother lives in St. Louis. 5 Tell her a lie for a poor devil's sake, please. Say I was killed in an instant and never knew what hurt me though God knows I've neither scratch nor bruise this moment! It's hard to burn up in a 10 coop like this with the whole wide world so near. Good-bye boys,-we've all got to come to it at last, anyway!"

The Boreas stood away out of danger, and the ruined steamer went drifting 15 down the stream an island of wreathing and climbing flame that vomited clouds of smoke from time to time, and glared more fiercely and sent its luminous tongues higher and higher after each emission. 20 A shriek at intervals told of a captive that had met his doom. The wreck lodged upon a sandbar, and when the Boreas turned the next point on her upward journey it was still burning with scarcely 25 abated fury.

30

When the boys came down into the main saloon of the Boreas, they saw a pitiful sight and heard a world of pitiful sounds. Eleven poor creatures lay dead and forty more lay moaning, or pleading or screaming, while a score of Good Samaritans moved among them doing what they could to relieve their sufferings; bathing their skinless faces and 35 bodies with linseed oil and lime water and covering the places with bulging masses of raw cotton that gave to every face and form a dreadful and unhuman aspect.

A little wee French midshipman of 40 fourteen lay fearfully injured, but never uttered a sound till a physician of Memphis was about to dress his hurts. Then he said:

"No-I-I am afraid you can not." "Then do not waste your time with me -help those that can get well." "But-"

"Help those that can get well! It is not for me to be a girl. I carry the blood of eleven generations of soldiers in my veins !"

The physician-himself a man who had seen service in the navy in his timetouched his hat to this little hero, and passed on.

The head engineeer of the Amaranth, a grand specimen of physical manhood, struggled to his feet a ghastly spectacle and strode toward his brother, the second engineer, who was unhurt. He said:

"You were on watch. You were boss. You would not listen to me when I begged you to reduce your steam. Take that!take it to my wife and tell her it comes from me by the hand of my murderer! Take it and take my curse with it to blister your heart a hundred years—and may you live so long!"

And he tore a ring from his finger, stripping flesh and skin with it, threw it down and fell dead!

But these things must not be dwelt upon. The Boreas landed her dreadful cargo at the next large town and delivered it over to a multitude of eager hands and warm southern hearts-a cargo amounting by this time to 39 wounded persons and 22 dead bodies. And with these she delivered a list of 96 missing persons that had drowned or otherwise perished at the scene of the disaster.

A jury of inquest was impaneled, and after due deliberation and inquiry they returned the inevitable American verdict which has been so familiar to our ears all the days of our lives-"Nobody to

"Can I get well? You need not be 45 Blame." afraid to tell me."

The Gilded Age, 1873.

FRANCIS BRET HARTE (1839-1902)

Unlike Mark Twain, Bret Harte was reared among bookish surroundings. His father, like Twain's, was a wanderer, but a wanderer from school to school. When his son was born, the father was a teacher of languages at Albany, New York, and before the boy was nine he had lived at Providence, Rhode Island, at Philadelphia, at Lowell, Massachusetts, at Brooklyn. and New York City. A frail, precocious lad, he read almost continuously during the years when boys are most active. He was fifteen and was dreaming over his Irving and his Dickens when his mother, who had become a widow several years before, broke up the little home in New York to go to live with her eldest son in California, and much against his will he followed shortly afterwards. For a time he worked as druggist's clerk, then as a teacher, and later, in Humboldt County, whither he had gone as a private tutor, he may have seen something of the mines, but soon he was learning the printer's trade. Returning to San Francisco he found work on the Golden Eagle, first as type-setter and finally as editor, and with this journal he was connected for some years. Later he was married, secured a position in the San Francisco mint, and in 1868 was made editor of the newly established Overland Monthly, a literary magazine which was designed to be the Atlantic Monthly of the Pacific coast. "The Luck of Roaring Camp" in the second number made him known for the first time in the East, and the song known popularly as The Heathen Chinee," 1870, gave him an international reputation. After an offer from the Atlantic Monthly publishers, Boston, he left with joy his California exile never to return. His later biography is brief. After a short stay in the East he accepted a small consulship in Germany, was soon transferred to Glasgow, and spent his last years in England, never once returning to his native land.

Harte preeminently was a short story writer. He wrote a few good poems, one or two novels of negligible value, and a great mass of short stories, the greater part of them dealing with early California life. His first collection, The Luck of Roaring Camp and other Sketches, 1870, contains by far his best work. In the history of the short story he occupies a unique place he blended the Irving sketch with the Dickens sentiment and the Dickens type of characters, added a melodramatic element, and presented the picture before the wild and picturesque background of the California gold era. His influence upon later American writers has been great. After his early volumes there began to appear the work of that "local color" school which for several decades dominated American fiction.

THE MISSION DOLORES1

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As I stand here this pleasant afternoon, looking up at the old chapel,- its ragged senility contrasting with the smart spring sunshine, its two gouty pillars with the plaster dropping away like tattered bandages, its rayless windows, its crumbling entrances, the leper spots on its whitewashed wall eating through the dark adobe, I give the poor old mendicant but a few years longer to sit by the highway and ask alms in the names of the blessed saints. Already the vicinity is haunted with the shadow of its dissolution. The shriek of the locomotive discords with the Angelus bell. An Episcopal church, of a green Gothic type, with massive buttresses of Oregon pine, even now mocks its hoary age with imitation and supplants it with a sham. Vain, alas! 20 were those rural accessories, the nurseries

The Mission Dolores is destined to be The Last Sigh' of the native Californian. When the last Greaser' shall indolently give way to the bustling Yankee, I can imagine he will, like the Moorish King, ascend one of the Mission hills to take his last lingering look at the hilled city. For a long time he will cling ten- 10 aciously to Pacific Street. He will delve in the rocky fastnesses of Telegraph Hill until progress shall remove it. He will haunt Vallejo Street, and those back slums which so vividly typify the degradation 15 of a people; but he will eventually make way for improvement. The Mission will be last to drop from his nerveless fingers. 1 Copyright by Houghton Mifflin & Co.

and market-gardens, that once gathered about its walls and resisted civil encroachment. They, too, are passing away. Even those queer little adobe buildings with tiled roofs like longitudinal slips of cinnamon, and walled enclosures sacredly guarding a few bullock horns and strips of hide. I look in vain for the half-reclaimed Mexican, whose respectability stopped at his waist, and whose red sash 10 the little one's toys in a glass case beside

failing garlands of immortelles, with their sepulchral spicery; here are little cheap medallions of pewter, with the adornment of three black tears, that would look like 5 the three of clubs, but that the simple humility of the inscription counterbalances all sense of the ridiculous. Here are children's graves with guardian angels of great specific gravity; but here, too, are

under his vest was the utter undoing of them. Here is the average quantity of his black broadcloth. I miss, too, those execrable original verses; but one stanza black-haired women, with swaying un- over a sailor's grave is striking, for stable busts, whose dresses were always it expresses a hope of salvation through unseasonable in texture and pattern; 15 the Lord High Admiral Christ!' Over

the foreign graves there is a notable lack of scriptural quotation, and an increase, if I may say it, of humanity and tenderness. I cannot help thinking that too many of my countrymen are influenced by a morbid desire to make a practical point of this occasion, and are too apt hastily to crowd a whole life of omission into the culminating act. But when I see the gray immortelles crowning a tombstone, I know I shall find the mysteries of the resurrection shown rather in symbols, and only the love taught in His new commandment left for the graphic touch. But

whose wearing of a shawl was a terrible awakening from the poetic dream of the Spanish mantilla. Traces of another nationality are visible. The railroad 'navvy' has builded his shanty near the 20 chapel, and smokes his pipe in the Posada. Gutturals have taken the place of linguals and sibilants; I miss the half-chanted, half-drawled cadences that used to mingle with the cheery 'All aboard' of the stage- 25 driver, in those good old days when the stages ran hourly to the Mission, and a trip thither was an excursion. At the very gates of the temple, in the place of those who sell doves for sacrifice,' a 30' they manage these things better in vender of mechanical spiders has halted with his unhallowed wares. Even the old Padre last type of the Missionary, and descendant of the good Junipero - I cannot find to-day; in his stead a light-haired Celt is reading a lesson from a Vulgate that is wonderfully replete with double r's. Gentle priest, in thy R-isons, let the stranger and heretic be remembered.

5

I open a little gate and enter the Mis- 40 sion Churchyard. There is no change here, though perhaps the graves lie closer together. A willow-tree, growing beside the deep, brown wall, has burst into tufted plumes in the fullness of spring. The tall 45 grass-blades over each mound show a strange quickening of the soil below. It is pleasanter here than on the bleak mountain seaward, where distracting winds continually bring the strife and turmoil of the 50 ocean. The Mission hills lovingly embrace the little cemetery, whose_decorative taste is less ostentatious. The foreign flavor is strong; here are never

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France.'

During my purposeless ramble the sun has been steadily climbing the brown wall of the church, and the air seems to grow cold and raw. The bright green dies out of the grass, and the rich bronze comes down from the wall. The willow-tree seems half inclined to doff its plumes, and wears the dejected air of a broken faith and violated trust. The spice of the immortelles mixes with the incense that steals through the open window. Within, the barbaric gilt and crimson look cold and cheap in this searching air; by this light the church certainly is old and ugly. I cannot help wondering whether the old Fathers, if they ever revisit the scene of their former labors, in their larger comprehensions, view with regret the impending change, or mourn over the day when the Mission Dolores shall appropriately come to grief.

From Condensed Novels and Other Papers, 1867.