publishing houses of little faith. Apparently, Bierce had thought to appeal past the dull and unjust verdict of such lower courts to the higher tribunal of the critics and possibly an elect group of general readers who might be expected to recognize and welcome something rare. But judgment was scarcely reversed. Only a few critics were discerning, and the book had no vogue. When The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter was published by F. J. Schulte and Company, Chicago, the next year, and Can Such Things Be by The Cassell Publishing Company, the year following, a few enthusiastic critics could find no words strong enough to describe Bierce's vivid imagination, his uncanny divination of atavistic terrors in man's consciousness, his chiseled perfection of style; but the critics who disapproved had even more trouble in finding words strong enough for their purposes and, as before, there was no general appreciation.

For the next twenty years Ambrose Bierce was a prolific writer but, whatever the reason, no further volumes of stories from his pen were presented to the world. Black Beetles in Amber, a collection of satiric verse, had appeared the same year as The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter; then for seven years, with the exception of a republication by G. P. Putnam's Sons of Tales of Soldiers and Civiliansunder the title, In the Midst of Life, no books by Bierce. In 1899 appeared Fantastic Fables; in 1903 Shapes of Clay, more satiric verse; in 1906 The Cynic's Word Book, a dictionary of wicked epigrams; in 1909 Write it Right, a blacklist of literary faults, and The Shadow on the Dial, a collection of essays covering, to quote from the preface of S. O. Howes, "a wide range of subjects, embracing among other things, government, dreams, writers of dialect and dogs"—Mr. Howes might have heightened his crescendo by adding "emancipated woman"; and finally—1909 to 1912—The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, containing all his work previously published in book form, save the two last mentioned, and much more besides, all collected and edited by Bierce himself.

On October 2, 1913, Ambrose Bierce, having settled his business affairs, left Washington for a trip through the southern states, declaring in letters his purpose of going into Mexico and later on to South America. The fullest account of his trip and his plans is afforded by a newspaper clipping he sent his niece in a letter dated November 6, 1913; through the commonplaceness of the reportorial vocabulary shines out the vivid personality that was making its final exit:

In December of that same year the last letter he is known to have written was received by his daughter. It is dated from Chihuahua, and mentions casually that he has attached himself unofficially to a division of Villa's army, and speaks of a prospective advance on Ojinaga. No further word has ever come from or of Ambrose Bierce. Whether illness overtook him, then an old man of seventy-one, and death suddenly, or whether, preferring to go foaming over a precipice rather than to straggle out in sandy deltas, he deliberately went where he knew death was, no one can say. His last letters, dauntless, grave, tender, do not say, though they suggest much. "You must try to forgive my obstinacy in not 'perishing' where I am," he wrote as he left Washington. "I want to be where something worth while is going on, or where nothing whatever is going on." "Good-bye—if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia!" Whatever end Ambrose Bierce found in Mexico, the lines of George Sterling well express what must have been his attitude in meeting it: