With Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892) we find ourselves on still firmer ground. She published short stories at frequent intervals from the late forties until 1891, and like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was contemporary with a long period of American development. She proved more adaptable to changes in the current taste, and yet succeeded in imparting an unmistakable individual flavor to her work. In such volumes as Somebody's Neighbors (1881) and Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills (1891), we find her earlier clearness of vision and sympathetic gifts of homely rendering matured by a vigorous, yet leisurely, narrative style. Her range is tolerably wide, and she would seem to have taken considerable pains in the documentation of aspects of life with which she could hardly have been personally familiar. We know that she was for years a country school-teacher, and in her quiet field of experience she learned to appreciate the value of homely realism. She is among the first to use dialect naturally and with precision, and gently alternates the sober humors of New England country life with its more tragic aspects, which are never overemphasized, yet never quite forgotten. Many later writers have carried her

methods much further to the point of caricature, while Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett have shown greater subtlety and a finer feeling for construction. Rose Terry Cooke may rightly claim, however, to be the pioneer and one of the most important figures among the many chroniclers of New England country life. It is odd that tales such as Mrs. Flint's Married Experience1 and The Town and Country Mouse 2 have not found their way into short story collections. They may not have the bouquet of more celebrated vintages, but they have the dependable flavor of good home-made elderberry wine.

The other short story-writers of the middle years are deservedly forgotten as such, with the noteworthy exceptions of Bret Harte and Mark Twain whom we shall discuss in the next chapter. Holmes and Longfellow occasionally essayed this form without noteworthy success. Longfellow's stories may be characterized as Irving and water, while Holmes achieved an isolated and not very remarkable tour de force in his sketch, A Visit to the Asylum for Aged and Decayed Punsters (1861).

1 Somebody's Neighbors. 2 Huckleberries.

A word may be said, however, with reference to Albert Falvey Webster (1848-1876), who won not undeserved esteem in his day, but who is now entirely forgotten. He contributed many stories to Appleton's Journal after 1870, which show much promise and a keen interest in experimentation. His stories are romantic and thoughtful and owe a great deal to Hawthorne, to whose daughter he was engaged before his untimely death at the age of twenty-eight. Among his best tales are Miss Eunice's Glove1 and An Operation in Money.2 His frequent overemphasis is a young man's fault, and his looseness of construction may have been due to an invalid's listlessness. There is enough promise in his work to make us regret that it was not possible for him to reach maturity.

1 Scribner's Stories by American Authors. vi. 117. 2 Ibid. i. 146.

CHAPTER VI

BRET HARTE AND MARK TWAIN

FITZ-JAMES O'BRIEN and Edward Everett Hale have won minor, but somewhat permanent, places in the history of the American short story. Their contemporary Bret Harte has gained a much wider suffrage from which it appears difficult to displace him. His best stories are of very high rank indeed, but nearly all of them were produced in a period of two or three years, and the voluminous literary output which followed during the thirty years of life that remained to him is of little more than ephemeral interest for the most part.

Francis Bret Harte was born on August 25, 1839, in Albany, New York. His father was a teacher of Greek in a small college, and died when the boy was fifteen. Harte had little formal schooling, for he was a puny boy, but he plunged into much desultory reading of fiction, and acquired a special fondness for Dickens and Irving which is evident enough in his writings. In 1854, he and his mother embarked for California by way

of Panama. We know that they lived for a time in Oakland across the bay from San Francisco, but the date of his mother's death, and even her personal relations with her son, are obscure. Harte apparently found various odd jobs in San Francisco and drifted from one to another. We may surmise the deep effect of the stir and color in this pioneer life upon an impressionable boy who was fresh from an academic home in provincial Knickerbocker Albany. Seldom do time and place and temperament come together so fortunately."

Later, he taught school in Sonora with indifferent success, although the reader well note that Sonora is in Calaveras County, and that Calaveras County is the chosen scene for some of his best stories. In later years, he had something to say of the pioneer life here as it impressed him in his formative years. "Here I was thrown among the strangest social conditions that the latter-day world has perhaps seen. The setting was itself heroic. The great mountains of the Sierra Nevada lifted majestic, snow-capped peaks against a sky of purest blue. Magnificent pine forests of trees which were themselves enormous gave to the landscape a sense of largeness and greatness. It was a land of rugged cañons, sharp declivities, and