Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 17 January 1888.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 4 (28/4, p. 44).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: The American writer Bret Harte's ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’, 1868, is collected in The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories, 1870. RK's various references to Harte show that he knew Harte's work well and that he was pleased to be compared to him; see, e.g., Letters, i, 151.

‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’ was reprinted in ‘Turnovers’, i, 1888; in the suppressed City of Dreadful Night, 1890; in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets; and in Harbord, iv, 1962–4.

Our Club is profanely called a “cock and hen” one – that is to say, it is open to all the ladies and gentlemen of the station. Sometimes the ladies keep to their own wing of the building, but more generally they stray elsewhere, and it is positively dangerous for a man to say what he thinks of things in general, in his own language. The Colonel's wife always manages to overhear, and then there is friction, because she asks her husband what the funny words mean. I do not say that the Honorary Secretary, who first threw the Club open to ladies, ought to be hanged, because no other living man in the station would or could manage our Club. I only want to point out a few things about Mrs. McGinnis and the baby and Bret Harte. It is too late to destroy Bret Harte's reputation; the baby hasn't got any, and Mrs. McGinnis is only an ordinary frivoller; but as Mrs. Nickleby said, “the principle remains the same”. Bret Harte once wrote a thing called “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” that I have known people cry over. It is all about a child who turned a miners’ digging-town into a little heaven and then killed the best man in it. I believed in that story till the night before last. Now I see that it was all made up – fudged and compiled just like a Government report, and I desire that everybody else should see this also.