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Which we had a small game,

And Ah Sin took a hand: It was Euchre. The same

He did not understand;

But he smiled as he sat by the table,

With a smile that was childlike and bland.

Yet the cards they were stocked

In a way that I grieve,

And my feelings were shocked

At the state of Nye's sleeve,

Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers, And the same with intent to deceive.

But the hands that were played

By that heathen Chinee, And the points that he made,

Were quite frightful to see,—

Till at last he put down a right bower Which the same Nye had dealt unto me!

Then I looked up at Nye,

And he gazed upon me;

And he rose with sigh,

And said, "Can this be?

We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor,"And he went for that heathen Chinee.

In the scene that ensued

I did not take a hand,

But the floor it was strewed

Like the leaves on the strand

With the cards that Ah Sin had been hiding, In the game "he did not understand."

In his sleeves, which were long,
He had twenty-four packs,-
Which was coming it strong,

Yet I state but the facts;

And we found on his nails, which were taper,
What is frequent in tapers,-that's wax.

Which is why I remark,

And my language is plain,
That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar,

Which the same I am free to maintain.

Joaquin Miller

Cincinnatus (Heine) Miller, or, to give him the name he adopted, Joaquin Miller, was born in 1841 of immigrant parents. As he himself writes, "My cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west. I was born in a covered wagon, I am told, at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio."

At fifteen we find Miller living with the Indians as one of them; in 1859 (at the age of eighteen) he attends a missionschool "college" in Eugene, Oregon; between 1860 and 1865 he is express-messenger, editor of a pacifist newspaper that is suppressed for opposing the Civil War, lawyer and, occasionally, a poet. He holds a minor judgeship from 1866 to 1870. His first book (Specimens) appears in 1868, his second (Joaquin et al., from which he took his name) in 1869. No response-not even from "the bards of San Francisco Bay" to whom he has dedicated the latter volume. He is chagrined, discouraged, angry. He shakes the dust of America from his feet; goes to London; publishes a volume (Pacific Poems) at his own expense and-overnight becomes a sensation!

His dramatic success in England is easily explained. He brought to the calm air of literary London, a breath of the

great winds of the plain. The more he exaggerated his crashing effects, the better the English public liked it. When he entered Victorian parlors in his velvet jacket, hip-boots and flowing hair, childhood visions of the "wild and woolly Westerner" were realized and the very bombast of his work was glorified as "typically American."

From 1872 to 1886, Miller traveled about the Continent. In 1887 he returned to California, dwelling on the Heights, helping to found an experimental Greek academy for aspiring writers. He died there, after a determinedly picturesque life, in sight of the Golden Gate, in 1913.

FROM "BYRON”

In men whom men condemn as ill
I find so much of goodness still,
In men whom men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot,

I do not dare to draw a line
Between the two, where God has not.

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Behind him lay the gray Azores,

Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores,
Before him only shoreless seas.

The good mate said: "Now must we pray,
For lo! the very stars are gone.

Brave Admiral, speak, what shall I say?"
"Why, say 'Sail on! sail on! and on!"

1 Permission to reprint this poem was granted by the Harr Wagner Publishing Co., San Francisco, California, publishers of Joaquin Miller's Complete Poetical Works.

"My men grow mutinous day by day;

My men grow ghastly wan and weak." The stout mate thought of home; a spray

Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek. "What shall I say, brave Admiral, say,

If we sight naught but seas at dawn?" "Why, you shall say at break of day,

'Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!'"

They sailed and sailed, as winds might blow,
Until at last the blanched mate said,
"Why, now not even God would know
Should I and all my men fall dead.
These very winds forget their way,

For God from these dread seas is gone.
Now speak, brave Admiral, speak and say❞—
He said: "Sail on! sail on! and on!"

They sailed. They sailed. Then spake the mate: "This mad sea shows his teeth to-night.

He curls his lip, he lies in wait,

With lifted teeth, as if to bite!

Brave Admiral, say but one good word:
What shall we do when hope is gone?"
The words leapt like a leaping sword:
"Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!"

Then, pale and worn, he kept his deck,
And peered through darkness. Ah, that night
Of all dark nights! And then a speck—
A light! a light! a light! a light!

It grew, a starlit flag unfurled!

It grew to be Time's burst of dawn. He gained a world; he gave that world Its grandest lesson: "On! sail on!"

Edward Rowland Sill was born at Windsor, Connecticut, in 1841. In 1861 he was graduated from Yale and shortly thereafter his poor health compelled him West. After various unsuccessful experiments, he drifted into teaching, first in the high schools in Ohio, later in the English department of the University of California.

The Hermitage, his first volume, was published in 1867, a later edition (including later poems) appearing in 1889. His two posthumous books are Poems (1887) and Hermione and Other Poems (1899).

Sill died, after bringing something of the Eastern culture to the West, in 1887.

OPPORTUNITY

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:-
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged

A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.
A craven hung along the battle's edge,

And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel-
That blue blade that the king's son bears, but this
Blunt thing-!" he snapt and flung it from his hand,
And lowering crept away and left the field.

Then came the king's son, wounded, sore bestead,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,

And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down,

And saved a great cause that heroic day.

Sidney Lanier

Sidney Lanier was born at Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. His was a family of musicians (Lanier himself was a skilful

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