deliberately to add a new province to American literature. Although
his work has been belittled because he has chosen exceptional and
theatric happenings, yet his real strength came from his contact with
Western life.

Irving and Dickens and other models served only to teach him his art.
"Finally," says Prof. Pattee, "Harte was the parent of the modern form
of the short story. It was he who started Kipling and Cable and Thomas
Nelson Page. Few indeed have surpassed him in the mechanics of this
most difficult of arts. According to his own belief, the form is an
American product ... Harte has described the genesis of his own art.
It sprang from the Western humor and was developed by the
circumstances that surrounded him. Many of his short stories are
models. They contain not a superfluous word, they handle a single
incident with grapic power, they close without moral or comment. The
form came as a natural evolution from his limitations and powers. With
him the story must of necessity be brief.... Bret Harte was the artist
of impulse, the painter of single burning moments, the flashlight
photographer who caught in lurid detail one dramatic episode in the
life of a man or a community and left the rest in darkness."[4]

Harte's humor is mostly "Western humor" There is not always uproarious
merriment, but there is a constant background of humor. I know of no
more amusing scene in American literature than that in the courtroom
when the Colonel gives his version of the deacon's method of signaling
to the widow in Harte's story included in the present volume, _Colonel
Starbottle for the Plaintiff_. Here is part of it:

"True to the instructions she had received from him, her lips part in
the musical utterance (the Colonel lowered his voice in a faint