BEST OF (#61 OF 566) LANTY FOSTER'S MISTAKE by BRET HARTE
1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales
Jon Hagadorn
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 May 2025
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A young girl meets a stranger riding near her parent's ranch, does him a favor, and later comes to believe he may be a Mexican horse thief.
From "Stories of the Early West" by Bret Harte
About the author
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Bret Harte
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People note American writer Francis Bret Harte for The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870), his best-known collection of his stories about California mining towns.
People best remember this poet for his short-story fiction, featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the Gold Rush. In a career, spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern United States to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but people most often reprinted, adapted, and admired his tales of the Gold Rush.
Parents named him after Francis Brett, his great-grandfather. Bernard Hart, paternal grandfather of Francis and an Orthodox Jewish immigrant, flourished as a merchant and founded the New York stock exchange. Henry, father of the young Francis, changed the spelling of the family name from Hart to Harte. Later, Francis preferred that people know his middle name, which he spelled Bret with only one t.
An avid reader as a boy, Harte at 11 years of age published his first work, a satirical poem, titled "Autumn Musings", now lost. Rather than attracting praise, the poem garnered ridicule from his family. As an adult, he recalled to a friend, "Such a shock was their ridicule to me that I wonder that I ever wrote another line of verse". His formal schooling ended at 13 years of age in 1849.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The |
| 0:07.0 | The Let me lay it on the line |
| 0:40.0 | This all got started with a slip of the tongue |
| 0:47.7 | The world was so much older than |
| 0:53.9 | When you and I were young The world was so much older then. |
| 0:58.5 | When you and I were young. |
| 1:05.4 | Welcome back, everyone, to 1001 classic short stories and tales. |
| 1:07.7 | This is your host, John Hagadorn. |
| 1:10.7 | Today, another great story from Brett Hart, this one called Lanty Foster's |
| 1:13.2 | mistake. And now our story. Lanty Foster was crouching on a low stool before the dying kitchen |
| 1:21.1 | fire, the better to get its fading radiance on the books he was reading. Beyond, through the open |
| 1:27.0 | window and door, the fire was |
| 1:28.9 | also slowly fading from the sky and the mountain ridge, once the sun had dropped half an hour before. |
| 1:35.1 | The view was uphill, and the skyline of the hill was marked by two or three gibbet-like poles, |
| 1:40.5 | from which, on a now invisible line between them, hung certain objects, mere black |
| 1:46.0 | silhouettes against the sky, which bore weird-likeness to human figures. Absorbed as she was |
| 1:52.0 | in her book, she nevertheless occasionally cast an impatient glance in that direction, as the |
| 1:57.4 | sunlight faded more quickly than her fire. For the fluttering objects were the weak's wash, which had to be brought in before night fell |
| 2:05.6 | and the mountain wind arose. It was strong at that altitude, and before this it ravished |
| 2:11.3 | the clothes from the line and scattered them along the high road leading over the ridge, |
| 2:15.9 | once even lashing the shy schoolmaster with a pair |
| 2:18.3 | of lanty's own stockings, and blinding the parson with a really tempestuous petticoat. |
... |
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