Readers of “Appleton’s Journal” in the early ’70’s must have looked forward from week to week to the stories of Albert Webster. For, often as he wrote, he always had a story to tell. It might be merely a romance of incident; it was usually a situation of very human significance; it always showed narrative instinct. With this native sense he was experimenting variously toward his art, while through his investigations of prisons, courts, and medical advice he was developing a serious and definite philosophy of life. But his own life was doomed. The quest of health, very like Stevenson’s, may be read in the titles of his descriptive essays during 1875 and 1876: Spring Days in Aiken, From New York to Aspinwall, The Isthmus and Panama, Up the Mexican Coast, Winter Days in California, etc. On the steamer from San Francisco to Honolulu he died, and was buried in the Pacific. He was betrothed to Una, eldest daughter of Hawthorne.

Of his many stories perhaps the most striking is An Operation in Money (“Appleton’s Journal,” September 27, 1873, volume x, page 387); the nicest in adjustment, Miss Eunice’s Glove, printed below. The Daphne (“Appleton’s Journal,” 1873, volume x, page 290) and A Fool’s Moustache (ibid., 1874, volume xii, page 259) read as if sketched for the stage. How he kept at his work appears pathetically in his leaving behind a tale laid at Santa Barbara and published after his death, The Owner of “Lara” (ibid., 1877, new series, volume ii, page 350).