STODDARD WHEN THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OLD.

write poetry. And that was the end of the color and the majesty, the large solemnity, the strength and the mighty earnestness of California, so far as the outer world saw. Of the old coterie that made the OVERLAND MONTHLY famous the world over, Bret Harte made us weep; Mark Twain made us laugh; but Charles Warren Stoddard, so far as he was with us, made us think and see and feel.

We were giving a benefit, headed by the late Mrs. Preston Moore, about twenty years ago in Oakland. A most worthy old fellow-scribe, who had been

caught under the carwheels of time, was the recipient, and Mrs. Moore's plan was to make the thing very Californian in style, since we had such a worthy old worthy, Calvin B. McDonald, to celebrate. But Stoddard's lines began:

The parables of Nature run

From the glow-worm to the sun.

"No," he said when protested with, "I write no more poetry about California, and I feel that I shall write no more poetry at all now; I have to go to

work."

Now I never heard him complain of California or find any fault at all with any one of us or of anything. But I believe with a belief that amounts to conviction that if the University of California, his own alma mater, had shown him half the respect and consideration that the Pope of Rome and others of like dignity and power in the far away worlds bestowed, he would have stayed with us. And if this man had been permitted to earn his bread here, why the deaf and the dumb and the blind would not today be traveling up and down the land and publishing to the world, "There is no color in California." "No songbirds in California," and ilk. But let us get on to the end.

The late James R. Osgood, America's oldest publisher, and perhaps most honest one, told me in London that Stoddard's book, "A South Sea Idyl," parts of which first appeared in the OVERLAND, was the best thing, after "Two Years Before the Mast," that had yet been written in this line. I remember with what earnestness he insisted that the railroads could do themselves an immense service by distributing cheap editions of that book all over the world. He said if the railroads and California would give up their tiresome map and emigration schemes and put a few millions of that book out in place of them, then the peo

ple would read and believe and want to see California and the isles of fire beyond.

Having shown how indifferent California had been to Stoddard, I, in passing, must refer to the behavior of the railroad. Stoddard was in the Levant, having been long in the Orient, when sad news came and he must return home. He reached New York nearly out of money, and so Stedman, the poet, and I applied for a pass. Nix; never heard of the man. And so Stedman went to the late Dr. Holland, then editor of the

Century, and got him to advance money enough on Stoddard's work for him to get home on!

Nowhere outside of his own country could this man have encountered so much ignorance of his work or such treatment of himself. He was coming to me in Rome once from London when, by mistake, near Geneva, he missed his car. Nothing serious in that, however, had it not been that, the day being hot, he had hung up his coat in the car, where he left it on getting out to lunch. The awkward part of it all was the coat con

tained his pocket-book, ticket, my address in Rome, and all his fortune except a few sous. But they brought him on through. Of course the devout fellow attributed all such civility as that to the saints. I have heard him say they are short of saints in America.

It may be as well though to mention. that the saints let him sleep in the streets of Rome that night, it being Saturday night and the town booming with the carnival. And he slept in the streets the next night too, fasting all day Sunday as any good Catholic ought to, he said. For he could not identity himself with his pocket-book and baggage at the station on Sunday.

When I went to the bank for my mail Monday morning, a pale, slim ghost crept out of the shadows in the corner by the stove and laid its head on my shoulder, while tears ran down its face. I rated him soundly and roundly for depending on his saints all the time. But he excused his saints by saying he had forgotten his saints for a second to think of me and so got into trouble.

I marveled that he did not take the fatal Roman fever and die.

"Die in the city of Saint Peter? Impossible!" And brow, breast, left, right, cross after cross in quick succession as I led to the Cafe Greco, did Charles Warren Stoddard, our boy "Charley."

I had secured a room for him with great trouble; a narrow, dirty thing, truly, but a palace at such times. "It looks like a coffin," he said as he put his head. in, "and smells like hell." He would not enter, said the street was better, and so, the saints helping him of course, by luck or accident, at last we found a pretty place, with a dozen pretty girls to help him count his beads, to thank the saints for deliverance from that dirty coffin.

It was my fortune and pleasure to take

him to the statue of Saint Peter in the mighty cathedral, as it had been to take Bret Harte to the grave of Dickens in Westminster, and I watched him most. curiously.

There stood the endless string of peasants, hats in hand, a prince now and then, a plumed and satin-clad lady in the line at intervals, this crowded, carnival time, and Charley, our wild and wicked Charley, after countless crossings and bendings of the knee, took his place in line, and so moved on, foot after foot, toward the great bronze big and dirty toe of St. Peter.

I stood close by the statue, where it stands, or sits, on its pedestal with lifted. fingers by the lofty wall; with the musicians, silver trumpets to their lips,. half a mile in the heaven-held dome above.

Each pious peasant devotee touched his lips to the worn toe and sandals, worn away almost to indistinctness, and then with his hat brim or the heel of his hand wiped the toe and with a bow and cross passed on. Those of the better class always used a handkerchief of course. But our esthetic poet made the one blunder, not an infrequent one with us, of wiping the toe before instead of after kissing. That is bad taste. But let us get out from St. Peter's or we shall never reach the end.

A few months after the carnival, Leman, the banker, brother to Arthur Leman, the artist, who has been here and will be here again, came to our place with dismay and told me Charley was dying, having had a fall from his horse in a ride home at night from Tivoli.

Priests came, bishops and archbishops. It is strange how this gentle poet got into the hearts of them all, and stayed there. there. While on this subject, let me say that no man, not even the President of the United States, ever had or ever could

have such favors and such friendship as this man, our bad, bad boy, Charley, had and still has abroad. So he did not die. And when his restoring strength permitted the liberty, I again rallied him. about his saints.

"Yes, it surely was the saints," he insisted, "for see what friends this misfortune has brought me."

And his faith did not betray him, for the Pope sent him a long letter, an autograph letter on parchment and in Latin, which is, or was once, hung up in the principal Catholic edifice in San Francisco. We heretics used to tell Charley as he lay there that this parchment forgave him all his sins, past, present, and future, he surely would have a good time from that day forth. And so he has had; let us thank his saints with him. He has from that misfortune forth had a good time- as good a time as his heart and that is saying it has ever

is good

been good indeed, for no man has ever lived so pure a life, so gentle and entirely good.

When he got well and the great Catholic University of America was established, his Holiness the Pope put out his hand over the heads of the hundred thousand learned men of Europe who would have been proud of the place and laid it on the head of Charles Warren Stoddard in choice. And so our poet bundled up his books and went away from Rome to the Washington university, to be buried there out of sight of us all, with the monks, the incense, the rituals, the music, the sacred things that he has always so loyally loved. He has gone

out of the life of Bohemia as the sunlight goes in the afternoon, and we sit saying of him as he sang when a boy of the sunlight of California:

The sunlight has flown like a butterfly
Brushing the gold from his wings.
Joaquin Miller.

Mary Bell.