Of a more subtile wit and a finer grain was Harte, who did his best work as a humorist in California. All his earlier triumphs were won here. His subsequent indorsement in a wider field was only an affirmation of this earlier public judgment.

Sometimes in the thicket one may come upon a wild mocking bird which is running up the gamut of its riotous burlesque upon the song of every other bird, and the sound of every living thing in the forest. But when all this is done, that mocking bird will sometimes give out a song which none other can match with its melody. As much as this, and more, lay within the range of this poet-satirist. His mocking had, however, a deep and salient meaning in it. When Truthful James rises to explain in what respect Ah Sin is peculiar, he has a higher purpose than merely to show the overreaching cunning of this bronzed heathen,

"With a smile that was child-like and bland."

So long as Ah Sin and his race could be plucked and despoiled at will, he provoked no antagonisms. But when he overmatched the sharpness of his spoilers, we have this tale, with its moral:

"Then I looked up at Nye;
And he gazed upon me;
And he rose with a sigh,
And said, 'Can this be?
We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor!'
And he went for that heathen Chinee."

Every demagogue in the State, who had rung the changes on the evils of cheap labor, felt the thrust; and it is doubtful if one of them has forgiven Harte to this day.

The dogmatism and intolerant assumption which sometimes become rampant in scientific societies, is thus punctured by Truthful James, in his description of "The Society upon the Stanislaus:"

"But first I would remark that it is not a proper plan
For any scientific gent to whale his fellow-man,
And if a member don't agree with his peculiar whim,
To lay for that same member for to 'put a head' on him."

When Jones undertook to prove that certain fossil bones were from one of his lost mules, then the trouble began:

"Now I hold it is not decent for any scientific gent
To say another is an ass—at least to all intent;
Nor should the individual who happens to be meant,
Reply by heaving rocks at him, to any great extent.
"Then Abner Dean of Angel's raised a point of order, when
A chunck of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen,
And he smiled a sickly smile, and curled up on the floor,
And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.
"For in less time than I write it every member did engage
In a warfare with the remnants of the paleozoic age;
And the way they heaved those fossils in their anger was a sin,
Till the skull of an old mammoth caved the head of Thompson in."