1. Minor punctuation and spelling errors have been corrected. A list of thesecorrections together with other notations is located at the end of this e-text.
A COLLECTION OF
BY THE LATE
SAN FRANCISCO:
A. L. BANCROFT AND COMPANY.
1876.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876,
By SUSAN RHODES,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D.C.
San Francisco:
A. L. Bancroft and Company,
printers and binders.
The sketches and poems in this volume were writtenat a time when the author was engaged in thepractice of a laborious profession. It was the intentionof Mr. Rhodes to collect them from the variousnewspapers and periodicals in which they had appeared,and publish them in book-form whenever he could obtaina respite from his arduous duties. But before hecarried out his long-cherished object he died, in theprime of his manhood and the ripeness of his literarylife. Many of his poems were written for the monthlygatherings of the Bohemian Club. There, when Caxton'sname was announced, his literary friends throngedabout him, confident of the rich treat the brain of theirbeloved poet had provided for them. His wit was keenand sparkling, without a shade of malice; and many ananecdote, that began with some delightful absurdity,closed in a pathos that showed the great versatility ofCaxton's genius. The Case of Summerfield, which isperhaps the most ingenious of the tales in that peculiarvein, was widely copied and warmly praised for theoriginality of its plan and the skill of its execution.The editor of this work has observed, as far as lay in[Pg 4]his power, the intention of the author in the selectionof those compositions which Mr. Rhodes had put asidefor compilation. With such a mass and variety of material(for Caxton had been a busy worker) it was difficultto select from productions all of which were excellent.Few liberties have been taken with them; for, indeed,Caxton was himself so conscientious in the arrangementand correction of his manuscript, that, with the exceptionof some slight and unimportant alterations, thisbook goes before his friends and the public in the sameorder as the author would have chosen had he beenspared to perform the task.
At the time when, according to custom, Mr. Rhodes'sdeath was formally announced to the severalCourts of Record in San Francisco, one of the learnedJudges urged the publication of his writings in someform which would give the bar a permanent memorialof one of it's most esteemed members, and tothem their proper place in American literature. Thishas been accomplished by the present volume. It issincerely to be hoped that while it will largely add to Mr.