he unexpectedly appeared as an attorney-at-law, though his legal investigations must have been of a somewhat limited extent. But he was brilliant and industrious, and soon was honored by an election as Judge of Grant County. The cases tried before him were not less interesting and romantic than everything else in his career, but they were not so many as to leave him no time for writing. Poem after poem was written, to be elaborated or thrown away as pleased the poet's fancy.

By 1869, after three or four years' rather monotonous service in his judicial capacity, the poet had accumulated quite a bundle of manuscript, and a selection therefrom was printed at his own expense in a little volume whose circulation was gratuitous. Joaquin wished to see what the public thought of his poetical ambition, and so he sent copies of his book to his friends and to the editors of papers in California and Oregon, nearly all of whom returned a favorable verdict.

Made happy by this expression of opinion in his favor, but longing for the appreciation of a wider and more critical world, Miller went to London in 1870, his family having been broken up in a way that has never ceased to be a grief to the poet. Whether the choice of London was a piece of sagacity or of good

ana, the Wabash region, on November 10, 1841, and lived there for thirteen years, when Hulins Miller, his father, determined to go to Oregon with his family. That was long before the days of Pacific railroads, and even the weary wagon ride across the plains was neither safe nor expeditious. What with the monotonous drive across the level country, and the difficult passage of the Rocky Mountains, it was three months before the destination, the Willamette Valley, was reached. Of course as little baggage as possible was taken, but household stores and cooking utensils were a neccessity; and it not infrequently happened that prowling Indians, or equally covetous wild beasts, made a swoop for plunder on such little bands of pilgrims. The long solemn marches by day; the perilous encampment by night, when watch-fires were built to keep off animals, and muskets were loaded as a precaution against Indian invasion; the every-day companionship of all that is grand and inspiring in natural scenery all these things impress a boy quite as much as a man, and to their existence is doubtless due much of young Miller's later love of poetry. He was thirteen years old, an age, when, if ever, come romantic dreams of adventure and discovery. But what other boys were eagerly reading in the novels of

James Fenimore Cooper, was present before Miller's very eyes.

There were seven in the family, four of the children being sons and one a daughter. Eugene City, in Lane County, Oregon, was their new home, but young Cincinnatus was not long content to remain in a region which to most would have seemed sufficiently romantic. The California mining excitement had now been raging for five years, and thither went the lad to try his fortune as a gold-digger. He contrived to make money enough to pay his current expenses, and very likely had, with all the rest, his "flush" days and his months of deepest poverty.

He went back to Oregon in 1859 without the princely fortune he had pictured to himself in his dreams, and was soon stung by one of the most praiseworthy of ambitions, that of getting a little "booklearning." He was still a mere boy, only eighteen, and the books he studied were of an elementary description. It is hard for a lad who has been out in the world to content himself long with the restraints of a school-room, and Miller soon got out of that irksome place.

Artemus Ward once remarked of Chaucer that "he was a great poet, but he couldn't spell;" and we