University"; and, in another note (vol. i, p. 170), he says that he wrote "the valedictory class poem" for Columbia College in 1859. It thus appears that his attendance at "Columbia College" falls in the period when, according to his other stories, he was engaged in his last desperate efforts to establish De Bloney's "Mt. Shasta republic"; and that his valedictory poem was apparently delivered in the year in which he fled from Californian justice to hide in Washington Territory.
If one thinks of Miller as having taken a regular college course ending in 1859, then one must be prepared to dismiss most of the Mt. Shasta stories as mythical; and doubtless there is a large element of fiction in them. They are not, however, quite so inconsistent with the "college" course as at first sight they appear. Eugene City, in which the "college" was located, was not settled till 1854; and the institution, with its "pleasant campus," in which the poem was perhaps delivered five years later, was nothing more than a small-town high school or seminary. And Miller, returning from California in 1858, or even as late as 1859, might, after a very brief instruction, have appeared as class poet in 1859. It is, moreover, unfortunately necessary to regard the statements about his own life made towards the close of his literary career with almost as much skepticism as those which he made near its outset—and for an interesting reason. In his last period, as the seer on The Hights, Miller desired
