Autograph Manuscript Signed, of a short story: An Episode of the West Woodlands.
Np: August 25, 1892.
Price: $7,500.00
About the item
29pp., written recto only, about 7400 words. Signed and dated on the final page. Draft with cross-outs and corrections. Each leaf inlaid. 4to. Later full burgundy morocco gilt, marbled endpapers, repair to joint of upper cover, wear to joints, slipcase. Provenance: William W. Carman (Parke Bernet, April 29, 1953, lot 187).
Item #375221
Published within Harte's A Protégée of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1894), the dark tale involves a fictional religious group whose church is near a California shoreline. A preacher named Brother Seabright arrives and makes an impression on the frontier congregants, particularly a young woman named Cissy Appleby, whose singing teacher, Elisha Braggs, has been attemting to lure her to live across the bay at his mission. In the end, Braggs is actually Elisha Barker, the first mate of the ship Tamalpais, which had wrecked along the shore years before, and who had stolen the ship's treasure; and Seabright had arrived to bring him to justice and find the treasure. A confrontation between the two ensues, and Appleby saves the day by ringing the bell of the church, which had formerly been the bell of the shipwrecked vessel.
