Patten were both knights.  Tony Weller is a magnificent grotesque.  He is a gargoyle, and his mouth, like the mouths of so many gargoyles, is always open.  He is garrulous, exuberant, flowery, preposterously sociable.  He holds that great creed of the convivial, the creed which is at the back of so much that is greatest in Dickens, the creed that eternity begins at ten o’clock at night, and that nights last forever.  But Yuba Bill is a figure of a widely different character.  He is not convivial; it might almost be said that he is too great ever to be sociable.  A circle of quiescence and solitude such as that which might ring a saint or a hermit rings this majestic and profound humourist.  His jokes do not flow upon him like those of Mr. Weller, sparkling, continual, and deliberate, like the play of a fountain in a pleasure garden; they fall suddenly and capriciously, like a crash of avalanches from a great mountain.  Tony Weller has the noisy humour of London, Yuba Bill has the silent humour of the earth.

One of the worst of the disadvantages of the rich and random fertility of Bret Harte is the fact that it is very difficult to trace or recover all the stories that he has written.  I have not within reach at the moment the story in which the character of Yuba Bill is exhibited in its most solemn grandeur, but I remember that it concerned a ride on the San Francisco stage coach, a difficulty arising from storm and darkness, and an intelligent young man who suggested to Yuba Bill that a certain manner of driving the coach in a certain direction might minimise the dangers of the journey.  A profound silence followed the intelligent young man’s suggestion, and then (I quote from memory) Yuba Bill observed at last: 

“Air you settin’ any value on that remark?”

The young man professed not fully to comprehend him, and Yuba Bill continued reflectively: 

“’Cos there’s a comic paper in ’Frisco pays for them things, and I’ve seen worse in it.”

To be rebuked thus is like being rebuked by the Pyramids or by the starry heavens.  There is about Yuba Bill this air of a pugnacious calm, a stepping back to get his distance for a shattering blow, which is like that of Dr. Johnson at his best.  And the effect is inexpressively increased by the background and the whole picture which Bret Harte paints so powerfully; the stormy skies, the sombre gorge, the rocking and spinning coach, and high above the feverish passengers the huge dark form of Yuba Bill, a silent mountain of humour.

Another unrecovered and possibly irrecoverable fragment about Yuba Bill, I recall in a story about his visiting a lad who had once been his protege in the Wild West, and who had since become a distinguished literary man in Boston.  Yuba Bill visits him, and on finding him in evening dress lifts up his voice in a superb lamentation over the tragedy of finding his old friend at last “a ’otel waiter.”  Then, vindictively pursuing the satire, he calls fiercely