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, Yet I state but the facts; And we found on his nails, which were taper, Which is why I remark, And my language is plain, 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 do not dare to draw a line Behind him lay the gray Azores, Behind the Gates of Hercules; The good mate said: "Now must we pray, Brave Admiral, speak, what shall I say?" 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, For God from these dread seas is gone. 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: Then, pale and worn, he kept his deck, 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:- A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel- Then came the king's son, wounded, sore bestead, And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout 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 |