A pioneering California writer, Charles Warren Stoddard (1843-1909) is best known for his homoerotic tales collected as South-Sea Idyls and The Island of Tranquil Delights. Stoddard was a member of San Francisco's Bohemian and journalistic circles, where he was appreciated for his wit. His literary friendships and lasting relationships included Ambrose Bierce, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, Robert Louis Stevenson, W. D. Howells, Henry Adams, Joaquin Miller, Jack London, George Sterling, Bliss Carman, Yone Noguchi, George Cabot Lodge, and Samuel Clemens.

After the death of Judge Kilburn his daughter came back to America. They had been eleven winters in Rome, always meaning to return, but staying on from year to year, as people do who have nothing definite to call them home. Toward the last Miss Kilburn ta

On the forward promenade of the Saguenay boat which had been advertised to leave Quebec at seven o'clock on Tuesday morning, Miss Kitty Ellison sat tranquilly expectant of the joys which its departure should bring, and tolerantly patient of its delay; for

Matthew Lanfear had stopped off, between Genoa and Nice, at San Remo in the interest of a friend who had come over on the steamer with him, and who wished him to test the air before settling there for the winter with an invalid wife. She was one of those

Midway of the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, where three arches break the lines of the little jewellers' booths glittering on either hand, and open an approach to the parapet, Colville lounged against the corner of a shop and stared out upon the river. It was

That was its conception; yet, as in the case of many another, the conceiver was unaware of it at the moment.

If there was any fellow in the Boys Town fifty years ago who had a good reason to run off it was Pony Baker. Pony was not his real name; it was what the boys called him, because there were so many fellows who had to be told apart, as Big Joe and Little Joe, and Big John and Little John, and Big Bill and Little Bill, that they got tired of telling boys apart that way; and after one of the boys called him Pony Baker, so that you could know him from his cousin Frank Baker, nobody ever called him anything else. You would have known Pony from the other Frank Baker, anyway, if you had seen...