Bret Harte's book is a collection of eight stories all taking place in the nineteenth century America in the time of gold rush. The narrator is also an active character in some of the stories or an active observer.
The first story called The Rose of Tuolumne and it is about a girl called Jenny. Jenny is the rose and she falls in love with a man called Ridgeway. After spending an evening talking with Jenny Ridgeway gets stabbed but survives. At the end Jenny exposes one her suitors as his attacker and he gets caught. Jenny and Ridgeway realize that the love and passion they felt for each other is gone.
The second story is about a man called Jack Oakhurst who falls in love with a married invalid woman and pays for her cure. They have a relationship after she gets cured. In a passion to protect her dignity he kills a man and comes to kill her too. She persuades him not to and he leaves and they never see each other again. Jack is also an outcast from society because of his unusual behavior and appearance.
The third story is about a Chinese boy whose intelligence and wit proclaimed a bright future ahead but he gets killed in a frenzy of ludicrous hatred for his race.
The fourth story is about a man who gets so caught up in his lies that he can't face the reality at the end. The old man Plunkett keeps promising that he will go home and even makes up lies about his wife and daughter which even he started to believe.
The fifth story is about a fool who remained a fool until his very end. Mr. Hawkins, the Fool, is a miner working at Five Forks. He keeps sending letter to which he gets no reply to his mistress and even builds a house for them to live in together. At the end the mistress ends up living in the house above the Fool's grave with her husband.
The sixth story is about the narrator bonding with a wild animal, a bear called baby. The animal eventually escapes him but he believes he saw it on the street as a part of the show.
The seventh story is a story about a woman poet from Fiddletown. The poet accepts her husband's daughter as her own and devotes her life to the girl. The girl goes back to her birth mother but in the end chooses and goes back to the woman she knows is her real mother.
The eight, concluding, story is a sort of funny story about narrator visiting a woman over hundred years old in order to get a part of history out of her. The woman, of course, talks incoherently and to her own liking and personal views despite narrator leading her to talk about George Washington. The narrator realizes that he didn't learn anything about what he came to learn.
