HEN the roving Arazona Indians

wish to descend from the mountains

and mingle with the something less

savage settlers, they first send down a small aged man; if he is slain, they say the loss is not great, and remain in their fastnesses, but if well received, others follow. If this little book should be well received, it is big enough for my purpose; if not, it is big enough for all purposes.

These lines were written on the rough edges of the frontier, amid the scenes described, where I have spent all but the last few months of my life.

There, walled from the world by seas on one hand, and the Sierra Nevada mountains in savage grandeur on the other, the heart would sometimes hunger after a gentler life, and the soul go out after the sweet ideal, a dove on the waters, and bring back dreams, and with them clothe facts and tales taken from the lips of mountain men as they sat and told them around their Of such creations are camp and cabin fires.

these songs.

The city of Mexico was my Mecca, and San Francisco, to me, a marvel of magnificence and civilization. This last summer I crossed the Rocky Mountains, and for the first time saw New York; a great place for cheap books, and a big den of small thieves.

I hesitate to confess these facts lest the clever critic and reader might, on the principle that no good thing can come out of Nazareth, look no further than this admission; and they who only seek a safe opportunity to condemn, do so at once.

But feeling that the book under the circumstances must have crudities apparent to the cultivated, but which I cannot now correct, I think it due. It must go from my pen to the public without the advantage of criticism before publication. Where this was written, rhyming is considered a mild type of insanity; while here, the reading of manuscript to a stranger is very properly deemed an assault with wilful intent to do bodily harm.

I almost feel that an apology is due for the bold act of a nameless young man leaving the woods of the Great West, and seeking the capital of the world, to publish; and am very doubtful as I write this. I think how much better it might be for me to say nothing of the reader-to be subduing the lands, digging the gold, and moulding the politics of the plastic New World, instead of vexing the brain with fancies, and perhaps courting crucifixion in a strange land. But poetry with me is a passion that defies