among the thick growth of manzanita bushes, its prostrate trunks mute witnesses to the passing of time. "Hollowheart, clinging lumps of bark, all changed into gray stone."

Cheeseborough's Hotel in Calistoga is no more. Where it once stood is now a garden plot belonging to the modern and very comfortable hostelry kept by a progressive and kindly German family who have come there since the Stevenson days. The Springs Hotel has also disappeared, but the low cottages are there with the rows of big feather duster palms. Beyond the cottages, plainly indicated by their columns of ascending steam, are the Springs, on a low flat soggy plain that wobbles with the impact of every step. Strangely enough this is the place where the natives have marked out a race track. Riding a horse over such ground must be like a trot on a spring hobbyhorse. In the cool air of early morning, with hot water oozing out over the

ground on all sides and clouds of steam constantly arising, this place is a vivid reminder of another hot district the

prospect of which used to keep some of us awake o' nights. Calistoga High Street, with its low square built houses, its small shops and not infrequent irrigating places is yet typical of the California town of the old order.

Rufe Hanson, erstwhile proprietor of the Silverado Hotel, and his garrulous wife, near neighbors and helpers of the tenants of the mine home are forgotten. Where the Hanson house stood there is now a fine vineyard on the edge of the bluff overlooking the valley below and the mountains that lead to the Golden Gate.

If the vicinity of the mine was a deserted waste in Stevenson's time it is today still more so, except that the cheerful nearness of the Toll House gives a pleasant human aspect to the whole neighborhood. There is an air of pro

gress, of wide-awake interest in to-day about the present mistress of the place. Mrs. Patten, a genial hostess, still believes in the mine, and says it would pay big now if worked, and her husband, a prospector of many years' experience, agrees with her. The Pattens cherish Stevenson's memory, especially the son, a fine type of vigorous and alert young manhood in business in San Francisco, who knows every detail of the Silverado book, and the traditions of the place. Mrs. Patten has half a dozen copies of "The Silverado Squatters, and says that every now and then some visitor sends her another one. She doesn't believe all Stevenson said. With an author's license he certainly "romanced" about some things. "It is a good story, though." I felt that possibly one reason for a slightly critical attitude might be the author's lack of entire faith in the value of the mine.

The Stevensons did not remain very long at Silverado. They must have found it in spite of its "isolation and independence a most inconvenient place to live. They went there in May and left for Scotland in July upon receipt of a most cordial invitation from the author's father to visit the old home. The story of the experiences at St. Helena to which was given the happy title of "The Silverado Squatters" was not written until two years later, when the author was again seeking health in Davos, Switzerland. Like all of his delightful volumes of travel it is brim-full of human interest, always cheerful in spite of discouraging lack of comforts, and permeated with the charm of his personality.

Saint Helena or Silverado yet bars. the progress of the railroad northward, but there is talk in Calistoga to-day of a project to extend the line over the very height of the mountain itself.

IN

N the characteristic little book of little essays which Mr. Aldrich has chosen to call 'Ponkapog Papers' there are half a hundred pages of "Asides "fragmentary and unrelated paragraphs, compounded of cleverness and shrewdness and wit. In reading these pages we feel almost as though the author had permitted us to peep into his note-book; and we find ourselves wondering whether our manners ought not to bid us close the volume. These "Asides" seem to be far less labored and less self-conscious than the "Marginalia," most of which Poe chipped out of the longer essays and reviews that he did not care to reprint in full.

Mr. Aldrich tells us that in the blotted memorandum-book from which he has chosen these chance paragraphs, there are a score or two of suggestions for essays and for sketches and for poems which he has not written and which he never will write. "The instant I jot down an idea," he informs us, "the desire to utilize it leaves me, and I turn away to do something unpremeditated. The shabby volume has become a sort of Potter's Field where I bury my intentions, good and bad, without any belief in their final resurrection." As if in proof of this confession, Mr. Aldrich has included among these "Asides" two or three suggestions, which he does not intend to utilize himself and which he generously presents to the public. They are seed-corn for stories which he has not cared to plant and tend and harvest himself.

their likenesses are taken by photography. Here is the motive for a fantastic shortstory, in which the hero-an author in vogue or a popular actor-might be depicted as having all his good qualities gradually photographed out of him. This could well be the result of a too prolonged indulgence in the effort to 'look natural.' First the man loses his charming simplicity; then he begins to pose in intellectual attitudes, with finger on brow; then he becomes morbidly self-conscious, and finally ends in an asylum for incurable egotists."

And here is a second as appallingly imaginative as the first was humorously fanciful: "Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!”

As we read this we cannot but wonder whether the bare idea thus boldly thrown out is not more powerful than any more amply wrought tale could be even if it was to be told with all Mr. Aldrich's own delicate ingenuity. And then we wonder whether the author refrained from writing this story himself for the reason he has given us,-that he tired of his own suggestions so soon as he got them down in black-and-white-or whether in this case his generosity to the public is not due to the intuitive feeling of an accomplished craftsman that the naked notion, stark and unadorned, is more striking and more powerful in

"In his memoirs, Krapotkin states the singular fact that the natives of the Malayan Archipelago have an idea that something is extracted from them when

elaborated according to all the precepts of the art of fiction.

In Poe's 'Marginalia' there is one passage in some measure akin to Mr. Aldrich's second suggestion. "I have

sometimes amused myself," the poet declared, "by endeavoring to fancy what would be the fate of an individual gifted, or rather accursed, with an intellect very far superior to that of his race. Of course he would be conscious of his superiority; nor could he (if otherwise constituted as man is) help manifesting his consciousness. Thus he would make enemies at all points. And since his opinions and speculations would widely differ from those of all mankind-that he would be considered as a madman, is evident. How horribly painful such a condition! Hell could invent no greater torture than that of being charged with abnormal weakness on account of being abnormally strong."

Here again the suggestion itself in its bare simplicity is more effective than any completed story. But there is another of Poe's notions which seems not so difficult of treatment and which he might very readily have carried out. He called it, "A Suggestion for a Magazine Article:"

"Here is a good idea for a magazine paper; let somebody 'work it up:' A flippant pretender to universal acquirement—a would-be Crichton-engrosses, for an hour or two, perhaps, the attention of a large company, most of whom are profoundly impressed by his knowledge. He is very witty, in especial, at the expense of a modest young gentleman, who ventures to make no reply, and who, finally, leaves the room as if overwhelmed with confusion; the Crichton greeting his exit with a laugh. Presently he returns, followed by a footman. carrying an armful of books. These are deposited on the table. The young gentleman now, referring to some pencilled notes which he had been secretly taking during the Crichton's display of erudition, pins the latter to his statements, each by each, and refutes them all in turn, by reference to the very authorities cited by the egotist himself, whose ignor

ance at all points is thus made apparent."

With characteristic affectation Poe insisted that his 'Marginalia' had been written in his books, on the margins themselves when these happened to be ample enough, and on a slip of paper deposited between the leaves when what he had to note was "too much to be included within the narrow limits of a margin." He admitted this to be whim, and declared that it might "be not only a very hackneyed, but a very idle practice," but he asserted that he persisted in it because it afforded him pleasure. He maintained that "the purely marginal jottings, done with no eye to the Memorandum Book, have a distinct complexion, and not only not a distinct purpose, but none at all; this it is which imparts to them a value." Unfortunately for Poe's claim that in these fragmentary notes he was talking "freshly, boldly, originally," his editors have been able to trace the most of his paragraphs to articles of his which he did not care to reprint in full. As Mr. Stedman explains, "they afforded the magazinist an easy way of making copy," since "they were largely made up of passages lifted from earlier essays and reviews." And Mr. Stedman also points out how Poe's pretence that his 'Marginalia' are what their prelude and title imply, "is made transparent by their formal, premeditated style, so different from that of Hawthorne's 'Note-Books,' or that of Thoreau's posthumous apophthegms and reflections."

It is the charm of Hawthorne's 'NoteBooks' that they really were written for himself alone and with no thought of publication. Although he went to them for material for the book about his English sojourn, 'Our Old Home,' and although he picked out of them many an idea which he worked up in a tale or in a romance, he kept them for his own eye only. As his widow asserted when she

made a selection from these journals for publication several years after his death, he was "entertaining, and not asserting, opinions and ideas." She insisted that her husband was questioning, doubting, and reflecting with his pen, and, as it were, instructing himself. So that his note-books should be read "not as definitive conclusions of his mind, but merely as passing impressions often."

The later journals kept in Great Britain, in France and in Italy are entertaining because they give us the impressions of Hawthorne himself, recorded at the moment of reception often; but they are far less interesting and less valuable than the note-books he kept in his youth before he had ever left his native land. Here we get very close to him; we see his mind at work; we trace the first hint of a story as he jots it down and we can see it growing as it takes root in his mind. For example, the idea of the 'Virtuoso's Collection' came to him again and again in slightly different forms; and as we turn the pages of his note-books we can discover when it was that he happened upon one and another of the marvelous curiosities which enriched the strange gathering. In like manner the first suggestion of that characteristic tale, the 'Birthmark,' is set down in three lines, which tell the whole story: "A person to be in possession of something as perfect as mortal man has a right to demand; he tries to make it better, and ruins it en tirely."

Sometimes the suggestion is merely fanciful, and too diaphanous to withstand elaboration: "A person to catch fire-flies, and try to kindle his household fire with them. It would be symbolical of something." Sometimes the suggestion is bold enough and alluring, but not to be accomplished without a complicated machinery, which would detract from its directness: "The situation of a man in the midst of a crowd,yet as completely in the power of another, life and

It

all, as they two were in the deepest solitude." Sometimes the suggestion is so characteristic, so individual, so Hawthornesque, that we find ourselves wondering how it was that it did not tempt Hawthorne himself to its ampler unfolding: "A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought; that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. might shadow forth his own fate-he having made himself one of the personOr this: "Follow out the fantasy ages. of a man taking his life by instalments, instead of at one payment,―say ten years of life alternately with ten years of suspended animation." Of course this last idea has a certain kinship with 'Rip Van Winkle' and with the 'Man with the Broken Ear;' but it differs in that Hawthorne supposes his hero to act voluntarily and more than once, whereas there was but a single and involuntary suspension of animation in Irving's tale and in About's.

Another of Hawthorne's suggestions he might have treated himself, no doubt, with the delicate aroma of pure romance; but the theme would also lend itself to a wholly different treatment, by a novelist enamoured of real things and of the externals of life: "A story, the hero of which is to be represented as naturally capable of deep and strong passion, and looking forward to the time when he shall feel passionate love, which is to be the great event of his existence. But it so chances that he never falls in love, and although he gives up the expectation of so doing, and marries calmly, yet it is somewhat sadly, with sentiments merely of esteem for his bride. The lady might be one who had loved him early in life, but whom then, in his expectation of passionate love, he had scorned."

No doubt more than one of these suggestions fructified in the minds of one or