A Tourist in San Francisco

I

THE first thing that strikes the tourist in San Francisco is the hills. All the mountains that skipped like rams in the Bible having decided to settle down by the Golden Gate, the lambs — the little hills — naturally did the same thing, and in due course San Francisco resulted. Old San Francisco, the city before the fire, is said to have been the most foreign, that is to say, the most picturesque city in the United States; most of this picturesque quality has departed, and what was, less than a hundred years ago, merely a collection of huts and tents, known as Yerba Buena (good herb), is now a flourishing and finished city, so far as any American city may be said to be finished. I suppose that if I had to live in a finished city — like Bath, England, for example — I should not like it for long; I know I should not. But San Francisco, it seems to me, has struck the happy medium between quiet dignity and the horrible turmoil of New York.

I found at my hotel letters of greeting, invitations, and cards giving me the privileges of several clubs. My hotel being near the Pacific Union Club, I was glad to avail myself of the courtesies of that magnificent institution. The building is of cut brownstone which came round the Horn years ago to form itself into the palatial residence of a once-famous citizen — Jim Flood, as he was always called.

But there is another club, even more exclusive than the Pacific Union, of which I became an honorary member, the ‘Hook and Eye Club.’ It is usually called to order at five o’clock in the afternoon, with the following ritual: ‘Who can I get to buy me a drink?’ Everyone feels personally addressed and gives the expected answer. Late comers invariably put the same question as they enter, and presently all is as one would have it in this, the best of all possible worlds. There is naturally a long waiting list, and I was told of a sort of Ladies’ Auxiliary or Dorcas Society called the ‘Hook and Ladder Club’ — climbers, hoping to break in; but it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. Los Angeles affects to be ‘dry.’ There is no affectation about San Francisco: it is, frankly, ‘wet,’ and the liquor is of the best. Prohibition there, as elsewhere, is an empty word; and, between the vintages of France and the excellent wine of the country, prohibition officers have no difficulty in making ends meet and, indeed, lap over. Have we not, now, reason to believe that this tragic and expensive farce will soon be ended ?¹

I lift my eyes unto the hills from whence cometh, not my help, but my fear. I shall never forget my first ride around San Francisco in a motor car. We climbed a hill as steep as the wall of a room, reached the top, shot down to the bottom and up again, and so on for hours. I sat on the edge of my scat, my heart in my mouth, expecting every moment to be dashed to pieces. If I prayed, — and I fear I did, — my prayers were answered, for nothing happened; nothing ever did happen, Mrs. Willie Van Antwerp, who was at the wheel, assured me, but this must have been said to quiet my fears. Accidents must happen; perhaps, like hanging, one gets accustomed to them. Taxi drivers, I feel certain, delight in the anguish of their fares. Noticing a sign which read, THIS HILL IS DANGEROUS WHEN WET, I inquired, ‘Do you have many accidents?’ ‘Oh, yes, frequently,’ was his reassuring answer, ’but we don’t mind ’em out here.’

Speaking of signs, I saw two amusing ones when I was last in England. One was in a miserable little hamlet in the Norfolk Broads: FOR HOT BATHS APPLY AT THE POST OFFICE. The meaning, it was explained, was that if one wanted a hot bath one went to the post office and there learned the whereabouts of a house which was in a position to offer the desired accommodation. The other was in a cheap restaurant in London. It read: —

IF YOUR WIFE CANT COOK DONT DIVORCE HER EAT HERE AND KEEP HER FOR A PET

II

But to return to San Francisco. Very few American cities have an atmosphere essentially their own, and, for the most part, those which have are not much to be envied. San Francisco has its own atmosphere and is proud of it; perhaps before the fire it had excess of it. Its position is superb, just within the Golden Gate, a narrow strait only a little over a mile wide giving entrance to a bay of great extent. It is not curious that explorers cruising the Pacific missed the entrance to the bay and that the site of the future city was first discovered from the land side. All that I knew of the city, up to the time of my arrival, I had gathered from reading, many years ago, the sea classic, Two Years before the Mast. It is not quite a hundred years ago that Richard Henry Dana, then a student at Harvard, for his health’s sake shipped on the brig Pilgrim as a common sailor, bound round Cape Horn for California. The book contains some of the earliest and best descriptions of the state that we have, and although Dana’s observations were rather upon the southern than upon the central portion, — he seems not to have gone inland at all, — he observes, prophetically, ‘If California ever becomes a prosperous country this bay [of what is now San Francisco] will be the centre of its prosperity.’

Gold had not yet been discovered in California when Dana made his voyage, and the chief products of the country were hides and tallow, which were plentiful and cheap, and the fortunes of some of the best people in Boston were made in the trade. His experiences in curing and packing hides and his comments upon the Catholic missions established by the Spaniards, the crimes committed by the Indians, the Mexicans, and, indeed, by all the peoples of the then Wild West, make most interesting reading. Viewing California to-day, it is difficult for one to realize that in less than a century lawlessness has been banished, and magnificent and prosperous cities have risen in what was only a century ago a wilderness.

The word ‘California’ aroused my curiosity, and, seeking information without conspicuous success in such books of reference as I have, I finally wrote my friend Robert E. Cowan, of Los Angeles, who is the great authority on the state’s history, and was enlightened, as I knew I should be. The origin of the word is obscure, but it is believed that when ‘stout Cortez,’ as Keats called him in his famous sonnet (he should have said Balboa, for it was Balboa who first saw the Pacific), discovered Lower California in 1535, there was, in all probability, on board his vessel a romance, then of great popularity, but now wholly forgotten, one chapter of which was devoted to a description of a fabulous island called California, an island filled with amazons, griffins, and the like, and of course with a plethora of jewels, gold, and silver. After his long cruise, Cortez, full of the romance of his expedition, is likely to have said, ‘This is indeed California.’ At all events, such are the facts first presented in an article which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864 by Edward Everett Hale, which have since that time been generally accepted.

Californians are justly proud of their state, which is the second largest in the Union, and in romantic interest stands first. We took it in whole or in part from the Mexicans, whom we thought cither too lazy or too incompetent to administer it. It is not, and never was, as some of our Western states are, merely a geographical expression, kicked into the Union for political reasons, as the King of England sometimes makes peers — for their votes. It came in as an empire and it remains one. Inevitably it. was destined to form the greater part of our Western frontier, extending, as it does, along the Pacific for almost a thousand miles. San Francisco looks through the Golden Gate upon the ocean and even more upon its great bay, on the opposite side of which are the cities of Berkeley, Oakland, and Alameda. On its own side of the bay and connected with it by superb motor roads are a dozen suburban towns down to Burlingame, all these tending to form — I hope I do not offend them — one great city, for it is as certain that San Francisco will ultimately absorb them all into herself as that Los Angeles will become a great seaport or that London has already swallowed up a dozen or more small villages.

A seaport has an advantage which no inland city, however great, can ever overcome. As New York may be said to be an outlying gate to Europe, so San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle may be said to be the frontier of Asia. What may not the future hold in store for these great cities? It was because Mr. Huntington asked himself this question and answered it to his satisfaction that he gave so liberally to Los Angeles. He took stock of its climate, which — if you like it, and it is a form of treason not to — is better than that of San Francisco, with its rain and fog; but these are responsible for the enormous fertility of the vast valleys which extend for hundreds of miles to the south and east of the city and are connected with it by rail, road, and boat, so that San Francisco is indeed the heart of the state, the more so since a range of mountains, the Sierras, forming practically the eastern edge of California throughout its entire length, keep the climate where it belongs. Beyond the mountains is the desert state of Nevada, with its population of about 90,000 chiefly employed in growing cactus and Senators.

But why should I bother myself and the reader with these details? Everyone knows them. But not everyone has motored or traveled by train, as I have, mile after mile through orange groves of California, hundreds of thousands of acres of them interspersed with orchards of peach and plum and apricot and other fruit-bearing trees, all in such perfect cultivation and order that one — from the East — has almost a longing for that miserable and disgraceful stretch of country which is the hinterland of Hoboken and Jersey City. And these fertile areas can be extended indefinitely: water will do it, and the scientific management of water is not difficult these days.

III

‘ By their fruits ye shall know them ’ — yea, verily; but what about trees that have no fruit on them? And yet my visit to California was chiefly to see one man, my oldest friend, Willie Van Antwerp, and another, my next oldest, a dignitary of the church (‘believe it or not’), and the great trees, the Sequoias, which are perhaps the oldest living things on this planet. If Van Antwerp had not, by good chance, happened to be hand in glove with A. Stanwood Murphy and Donald MacDonald of the Pacific Lumber Company, I should not have been able to see them so abundantly. As it is, I feel that the great trees are my personal friends — if an atom of my size and age may have for friends giants of the age of five or six thousand years.

I have heard it said that individual specimens of the eucalyptus in Australia are taller, and that some of the cypresses of Mexico are older than our own redwoods, but I have seen the redwoods and am content.

We had only been in San Francisco a few days when an invitation arrived from Mr. Murphy, the president of the Pacific Lumber Company, to go with him by train to Scotia, a night’s ride to the north, there to spend a week-end in the Director’s Cottage, where men and motors would be placed at our disposal. How glad we were to accept the invitation I need not say. We were a party of six, and our hosts were men who had spent their lives with and among the trees. First let me say that there are two — there may be more, but we saw two — famous groups of trees: one then belonging to the Pacific Lumber Company, several hundred miles north of San Francisco, and another about a hundred and fifty miles almost due east of the city, through which one may pass as one enters the Yosemite. The latter contains the largest and oldest trees, but as a whole this national grove is not so impressive, and certainly is not so well kept, as the grove which is, or was when I visited it, the property of the Lumber Company.

As with the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, everyone who has seen these great trees has described them, and yet one feels how futile his attempt must be. I have already referred to their great age. When I was a boy I was taught that the world is about fiftyseven hundred years old. If my early training was correct, these trees then may be older than the world, which adds greatly to their interest. They run thirty-odd feet in diameter, a hundred in circumference, and three hundred and fifty feet high, and perhaps two hundred and fifty feet to the first branch. But figures mean nothing, and if my reader hates them as much as I do he will be glad to have done with them. Now let me ask a question. By what known means in mechanics is the sap lifted to the tops of these trees?

I put this question to Mr. Murphy, who gave it up and told me he would inquire from one who ought to know. As a result, a gentleman unknown to me developed a number of interesting theories, wrote learnedly to me of ‘transpiration pull and water cohesion,’ and even so far forgot the ignorance of the man to whom he was writing as to describe a process which he called ’osmosis,’finally confessing that authorities differed — as is the invariable rule with authorities in every walk of life.

For their immense size the roots of these great trees are small and do not extend many feet into the earth, so that they are easily overturned. The trees are for the most part as straight as an arrow, and their bark is rough, almost ragged. One knows, of course, that they are ‘evergreens,’ but does everyone know that a bird is never seen or heard in these immense forests, hundreds of square miles in extent? This is due undoubtedly to the highly aromatic nature of the redwood, which birds find unpleasant and which insects equally dislike. As a result, there is an almost unearthly quiet in these noble forests. The trees stand close together, as close as stone columns in a cathedral of endless extent; the branching boughs, far overhead, form a great basilica in which there is absolute silence. It is a place for reverie. ‘The groves were God’s first temples,’ and these trees may be His last, for they are growing still and, seemingly, can withstand anything except fire. Against this they have no protection, and it is sometimes pitiful to see a grand tree or group of trees which has been almost destroyed by that element.

The wood itself of these trees is practically indestructible. This is proved in many ways. For example, a tree for some reason falls to the earth; presently, by some means, a sapling gets astride of it and takes root; finally the sapling becomes a tree, one half of which is on one side of the fallen giant, the other half on the other. Does the fallen tree decay? No fear. After centuries — for the age of a tree can be told to a nicety by its rings (a ring for every year of its life) — the wood of the fallen tree is as sound as ever, and some day, maybe, foresters will come along and saw away the fallen log on either side of the standing tree. Several such examples or specimens were pointed out to me. Of what good is the lumber? Well, in one town through which we passed we saw a good-sized church built of the timber cut from one tree. Where great strength is not required, the redwood may be used for any purpose for which lumber is suitable; it is especially good for clapboards of houses, for shingles, and for cigar boxes.

I have said that the largest trees, the ‘Grisly Giant’ and others named after our famous men, are not those of the Bull Creek Flat through which I was conducted under such distinguished patronage, but in another grove southeast of San Francisco. While I was in Scotia, negotiations were just about completed by which a portion of the holdings of the Pacific Lumber Company were being taken over by the Save-the-Redwoods League, to be preserved for the public forever. Toward the fund necessary to obtain a tract of over thirteen thousand acres, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., with his usual generosity, contributed two million dollars, and various organizations, including the Garden Clubs of America, gave or pledged substantial sums, and finally the great object was achieved. My friends of the Pacific Lumber Company were in a difficult position; they had, as officers of a corporation, a duty toward their stockholders, and they had also a duty toward the public, who insisted that no more trees be cut. The Savethe-Redwoods League was much helped by public declarations of men in every walk of life. It is always easy to get a man to declare that another man should surrender his property for the public good. Sam Blythe said this and Professor Campbell said that, Dr. Crawford this and Joe Hergesheimer that, until finally the effort was successful and the redwoods were saved. Joe, who is a neighbor of mine, slings a very flowery pen, and upon occasion can let himself go very effectively. He said: —

Standing in this grove of redwoods, I thought of the bitter and vain resentment that the future — when it had learned that commerce was not enough to keep the heart alive — would hold against the past, our present. The grace of the towering trees masked their gigantic span; the ground, in perpetual shadow, held only flowering oxalis and emerald ferns. It was raining very softly. The fallen trunks of an utter remoteness, too great to see over, were green with moss. The whisper of the wind was barely audible, far off, reflective; the gloom in the trees was clear, wet, yet mild. It was the past. And this was the redwoods’ secret, their special magic, that they absolved, blotted out, the fever of time, the wasted years, the sickness of mind, in which men spend the loneliness of their lives.

It was a long pull and a strong pull and a pull all together, but the thing after ten years was done. The redwoods were saved and the world is the richer therefor. Nothing on this continent is so well worth a visit. I shall never forget the great trees of California.

IV

The Yosemite is roughly one hundred and fifty miles east of San Francisco. One uses the phrase, ‘seeing the Grand Canyon,’ but one refers to ‘going into the Yosemite.’ Both phrases are properly descriptive. There are indeed two Yosemites — the park, which contains about eleven hundred square miles, and the valley, which may contain ten. It is the valley which people usually refer to as the park. Through this valley flows a turbulent stream, but this stream, drawing hundreds of little rivulets into itself, finally becomes the Merced River, and is responsible for the magnificence of the surrounding scenery. Look at it to-day and one would not suppose that it was once capable, with the assistance of a glacial disturbance, of cutting its way to the depth of thousands of feet through hundreds of miles of the toughest granite. The valley which it has scooped out and the meadow which it has formed are now level and park-like. Its broad and well-kept lawns are interrupted by drives and walks bordered with flowers. There are several excellent hotels, hundreds of cottages, and several well-patronized camps which, under government restrictions, may be enjoyed by the public.

The lovely and beautiful oasis, this modern temple, was discovered as recently as 1851, when a small military force in pursuit of some marauding Indians was unexpectedly led into it. Its great magnificence, however, is the granite walls which enclose the valley on all sides except where the river has its outlet, by the side of which a road has been made. One enters the Yosemite after a long day’s motoring; a turn or two in the road, and through a great portal of towering rock one comes upon a scene of unexampled peace and beauty. The craggy rocks which encircle the valley are of such stupendous size as to form individual mountains of granite, sometimes worn smooth by the action of the elements, elsewhere forming lodgment for great trees which arc so far above the spectator that they appear to be mere shrubs. Who that has seen the great sheer silvery mass, El Capitan, over three thousand feet in height, or the Three Brothers, or Sentinel Rock, or the Bridal Veil Fall, nine hundred feet high, will ever forget its beauty?

I visited the Yosemite in the spring when the vegetation was rich and luxuriant; I should like to visit it in the winter; I should like to see the immense dark fir trees when covered with snow. Our national parks are a magnificent inheritance. They are each year enjoyed by thousands and they will be enjoyed by increasing thousands as the years roll on. California — the whole nation — is singularly blessed in having such noble recreation grounds.

V

Upon our return to San Francisco a life of dissipation was inevitable. The hospitality of ‘the Coast’ is famous; one has perhaps some claim upon one’s friends, but I was constantly meeting a stranger whom I left a friend. The names of Albert Bender, the distinguished, kindly, and generous art patron, and Alfred Sutro, a busy lawyer who ‘ knocked off’ an entire day to drive me down to his home in the country, instantly come to mind. Van Antwerp devoted to us an entire week; his kindness can only be acknowledged, it can never be repaid. But why mention individuals when so many were ready and seemingly anxious to show their hospitality and good will? I can quite understand the courtesy of the Pacific Coast overwhelming the visitor from a foreign land. At first not knowing how to account for it, he finally comes to accept it as his due, whereas it is merely the spontaneous expression of kindliness which he probably does not deserve.

Everyone knows, I take it, of the Bohemian Club; its ‘high jinks’ are famous the world over. In the summer these take place in a grove of immense trees some distance from the city; at other seasons the clubhouse is the scene of its hospitalities. It honored me with a dinner at which over three hundred men were present, Edward F. O’Day, Sire of the Club, in the chair. The Bohemians are presumed to be interested in literature, art, music, and the drama, and men possessing among them all the talents brought them forth for my amusement and edification — but modesty forbids that I should enlarge upon the gayety of the evening other than to say that, had not Father Time screwed my head on pretty tight, it would have been turned. The menu was a work of art and humor, supplied by Jimmy Hatlo, whose comic sketches burlesquing the titles of several of my books I shall never look upon without a smile. Toward midnight an old friend of ’the Lambs,’in New York, whom I had not seen in years, came up and, grasping my hand, said, ‘ Well, Newton, it was a rotten, highbrow evening and I hope it will be a long time before we have another. The next time, you come in the summer and we ’ll do something to entertain you.’

The Book Club of California, of which Alfred Sutro is president, cut out a small job for me which I hope I did creditably. My Eastern complacency was sadly disturbed by the range and intensity of the interest shown in everything that concerns itself with literature and with books. This goes far to explain why it is that printing is an art that flourishes in California as it hardly does elsewhere in our country.

And this leads me to speak of the Grabhom Brothers, printers of books which are works of art. I had known of their work, of course, but the men themselves I had not met until I reached San Francisco. And I was especially pleased to renew my acquaintance with John Henry Nash, whom I had entertained at Oak Knoll. Nash is an Old World craftsman whom chance has let fall into the City of the Golden Gate, and the text ‘A prophet is not without honor save in his own city’ does not apply to him — he is honored of all men.

Some years ago, the Book Club of California asked me if it might not print for its members some essay of mine not before printed, and I, conscious of the honor done me, replied that if and when I had anything I thought suitable I would let the Club have it, provided John Henry Nash would print it. And so it happened that when I had to read a paper at Lichfield, England, upon the occasion of my election as president of the Johnson Society, it at once occurred to me that my address might be suitable for publication by the Club. So, immediately after reading the paper in the Guildhall at Lichfield, I sent it to Flodden Heron, a fine Scotsman who first approached me in the matter, and in due course a large, handsomely printed volume of not too many pages appeared, Mr. Strahan’s Dinner Party, with a much too flattering introduction by Edward F. O’Day.

I was, of course, greatly pleased to be printed by such a man as Nash, and the correspondence about the book led to our better acquaintance. It is characteristic of Nash’s thoughtfulness and generosity that he had two copies of the book sent to a famous binder in Germany and there bound in royal white vellum, in such a manner that the binding will never warp, as vellum bindings usually do. One copy he presented to me, the other, also signed by him, he gave to the library in the Johnson Birthplace in Lichfield.

I must not say that Nash’s sole interest in life is printing, for he has a beautiful wife and a home in Berkeley than which nothing could be lovelier. It sits on the brow of a high hill; from the front porch one overlooks the wide bay with San Francisco in the distance, while from the back terrace one looks down into a valley with a range of mountains beyond. It can hardly be that because all my life I have longed for a view, and have been obliged to content myself with looking upon a bank on the top of which runs the Pennsylvania Railroad, I think Nash’s site so superb. He had, however, two ideas in mind when he selected the spot and erected his house: one was to make it a home for the time being; ultimately it was to become a small and intimate museum to house his collection of printed books, of which any man might be proud. These books are now in an exhibition room adjacent to his printing house, and it was in this room and the room adjoining that he gave us a reception to which many of the important people in the city were invited — and came, not so much to honor us as to show their good will to John, who is more of an institution than an individual.

Nash as a printer is known far and wide. Several years ago, when in London, I went with a friend to see the King’s Library at Windsor, and one of the first things which the librarian showed me was a copy of what Nash considers his masterpiece, Dante’s Divine Comedy, which the King had recently purchased. I may say here that the Holy Father at Rome, who is a book lover and was once a librarian, acknowledged over his own autograph a copy which Nash presented to the Vatican Library, bound — as all books which enter it must be — in white vellum. I have been the fortunate recipient of many of those slender volumes and leaflets ‘done by John Henry Nash with his own hands,’ for he sets type himself and not merely oversees its setting.

John never does anything by halves; what he cannot do superlatively well he does not do at all. He is now engaged upon a printing venture which will tax all his resources, financial and other: it is no less than a magnificent edition of the Vulgate — the Latin text, which will be carefully read under the direction of the Roman Catholic Bishop of California, for John, though not himself a Catholic, stands high in the favor of the Catholic Church. This great Bible, in Latin, has not found a proper printer in a century. It will be a magnificent publication in several volumes, superbly bound: the price is one thousand dollars a set. When I heard of the launching of this noble enterprise I sent in my subscription by telegraph; not because I feared I should get left, but because such a venture should be encouraged — especially in times like these. It would not be fair not to mention the fact that Nash owes much to the scholarship of Eddie O’Day and to the high artistic ability of William Wilke, who designs his exquisite borders, his illuminated letters, and occasionally etches a portrait.

VI

Dr. Johnson once spoke highly of a man because he never passed a church without raising his hat. I am moved by no such impulse, but I never, if I can help it, pass a library without having a look, and the library of the University of California pleased me greatly. I have no knowledge how the library itself compares with that of Stanford University, — I was told that the standard of scholarship at Berkeley is not as high as it is at Palo Alto, — but the atmosphere at Berkeley is delightful, and I was glad to meet once more my old friend Richard T. Holbrook, whom I used to know so well when he was professor of Romance languages at Bryn Mawr.

By chance, Holbrook was dining with us on that fateful Sunday in August 1914 when news came that the German armies had entered Belgium and that Liége was being bombarded. At some later date he gave me a translation of a pronouncement of Gaston Paris, a famous French savant, on science, which occurred in his lecture on La Chanson de Roland delivered in Paris on the eighth of December, 1870. The city was at the time being shelled by the Germans, and patriotism had once again fallen into one of its frequent conflicts with truth. The passage below is Holbrook’s creed and should be that of every scholar: —

In general, I do not believe that patriotism has any cause for a conflict with science. University chairs are not rostrums; it is turning them away from their real destination to make them serve for the defense or the attack of anything outside of their intellectual aim. I profess absolutely and without reservation this doctrine: that science has no other object than the truth, and the truth for its own sake, without any care as to the consequences, good or bad, regrettable or fortunate, which that truth may have in practice. He who through a patriotic motive, religious, and even moral, allows himself, in the facts that he is studying, in the conclusions that he draws, the least concealment, the slightest alteration, is not worthy of holding his place in the great laboratory where probity is a claim for admission more indispensable than skill. Thus understood, the studies that we share, carried on with the same spirit in all civilized countries, form, above nationalities which are restricted, diverse, and too often hostile, a great fatherland which no war soils, which no conqueror threatens, and in which men’s souls find the refuge and the unity that the City of God has given them in other times.

I was interested to see this passage in its original French, illuminated and framed, still hanging over my old friend’s desk at Berkeley. The attitude of the two score or more German college professors was very different. This group of donkeys at the crack of the Emperor’s whip set down their names to a silly document to the effect that Germany did not begin the war, that the Fatherland was invaded and they were only fighting in self-defense. They had comfortably forgotten the often-repeated doctrine to which they had once subscribed, — the doctrine of Bernhardi and of Treitschke, — that ‘war is the supremo expression of the energy of the state, and that states owe it to themselves to create enemies whom they must fight in order to perfect and develop their own characters.’

The University at Berkeley is fortunate in its situation. From its wooded hills it overlooks the fine Bay of San Francisco, and the architecture of its buildings suggests considered growth rather than sudden creation. At Leland Stanford, I found the yellow stone walls and the red-tiled roofs of its buildings under a glaring sun monotonous and fatiguing. Stone walls do not a prison make — nor universities; and in my judgment all our universities are too large by half. We used to believe that education was the solution of all our difficulties; now we know it too frequently augments them. When one looks at our newspapers one feels it is a pity so many boys and girls have been taught to read.

VII

San Francisco has suffered or enjoyed one bonanza after another, very different in kind, but all money-producing. It is the centre of an empire of its own. A century ago it was hides and tallow. Wild or half-broken horses were practically valueless; one caught or borrowed one, rode it till it dropped, and then got another for a dollar. Later they were practically exterminated to make way for cattle. Then came the gold rush with its evils and romances. This was followed by an era of cattle raising on such a scale as only we in America (and perhaps Australia) know anything of. In 1876, California had over seven million sheep alone. Then came wheat and barley, and now FRUIT, including grapes and nuts.

‘God smiles on California.’ It is her boast that she can supply the entire world with fruit, and as one rolls for hundreds of miles over matchless roads through orchards devoted to growing, under seemingly ideal conditions, every fruit one can put a name to and many that one (this one) cannot, this boast would seem to be well founded. The climate of California, which enables one to grow practically anything, makes the people, women as well as men, an out-of-door, pleasure-loving folk. Men go fishing and hunting to an extent unknown to us of the East. Life seems more generous, less complicated than with us. Golf clubs desired to extend their hospitality, and I was obliged to confess that I loathed the game. As I look back upon an afternoon at the Cypress Point Club at Pebble Beach, I begin to feel that in my busy life I have neglected two important things — golf and cards. ‘To play cards is to speak an international language,’ says my friend Ellis Ballard — and, by the by, he speaks it very fluently. I have no smattering of it and am now too old to learn. . . .

I had promised Ross Patterson, a physician to whom I owe my life, that when we reached New Orleans I would go to ‘Antoine’s’ (a restaurant famous for almost a century), order a good dinner, and think of him. I went and thought. The restaurant was almost deserted. A sleepy darky took my order, which was a long time coming. The food was poor, the prices excessive. Its glory, of which there were evidences, had departed. It was as dull and uninteresting as a restaurant in Philadelphia.

We are passing through a curious phase of puritanism. One thinks of the time when all the theatres in London were closed — and it was followed by such excesses as disgraced the reign of Charles II. Coming events cast their shadows before them. Has not the shadow fallen upon us already?