C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Bret Harte

But still when the mists of doubt prevail,

And we lie becalmed by the shores of age,

We hear from the misty troubled shore

The voice of the children gone before,

Drawing the soul to its anchorage.

Fades the light,

And afar

Goeth day, cometh night,

And a star

Leadeth all

Speedeth all

To their rest.

Last night, above the whistling wind,

I heard the welcome rain,—

A fusillade upon the roof,

A tattoo on the pane:

The keyhole piped; the chimney-top

A warlike trumpet blew.

That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

As I stand here this pleasant afternoon, looking up at the old chapel (the Mission, Dolores), its ragged senility contrasting with the smart spring sunshine, its two gouty pillars with the plaster dropping away like tattered bandages, its rayless windows, its crumbling entrances, the leper spots on its whitewashed wall eating through the dark adobe—I give the poor old mendicant but a year longer to sit by the highway and ask alms in the names of the blessed saints.

O’er the trackless past somewhere lie the lost days of our tropic youth.

Physically, they exhibited no indication of their past lives and characters. The greatest scamp had a Raphael face, with a profusion of blonde hair; Oakhurst, a gambler, had the melancholy character and intellectual abstraction of a Hamlet; the coolest and most courageous man was scarcely over five feet in height, with a soft voice, and an embarrassed manner.

The smile that was childlike and bland.

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