presentation copy of this book, now in the possession of the University of Chicago, bears the author's own veracious comment that it "isn't worth a damn." Though he salvaged a portion of it in "The Sea of Fire," the original title disappeared from his collective edition. Soon after his return to America, he began to be visited by dramatic aspirations; and in 1881 he achieved considerable success with The Danites in the Sierras. The three other plays which he preserved—Forty-Nine, Tally-Ho, and An Oregon Idyl—are like The Danites in presenting incidents in the story of the frontier. In 1881, he published also The Shadows of Shasta, a prose tale anticipating Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona in indignation at our treatment of the Indians. In 1884 falls the interesting but very fragmentary autobiographical miscellany called Memorie and Rime. With The Destruction of Gotham, 1886, a sensational novel of class-conflict in New York City, Miller somewhat significantly terminated his search for fortune and glory in the Eastern states.
He had been a sentimental pilgrim in England, a poetic refugee in Italy, and a picturesque visitor—an ambassador from the Sierras—even in New York and Washington. Though he had enjoyed playing all these parts, perhaps by 1886 he felt that he and his public were beginning to lose their zest for one another. Furthermore he had now married again and at least entertained the thought of settling down. The loss of considerable money in Wall
