And for all of this—for fruit, flowers and scenery, for real-estate agents, and for a race of the most persistent boosters under the sun—the climate is responsible. Climate advertised is responsible for the rush of travel from the East that sets in with the coming of winter and lasts until well into the following spring; and climate realized is responsible for the string of tourist hotels that dot the Coast all along from just below San Francisco to the Mexican border.

Both externally and internally the majority of these hotels are singularly alike. Mainly they are rambling frame structures done in a modified Spanish architecture—late Spanish crossed on Early Peoria—with a lobby so large that, loafing there, you feel as though you were in the waiting-room of the Grand Central Terminal, and with a dining room about the size of the state of Rhode Island, and a sun parlor that has windows all round, so as to give its occupants the aspect, when viewed from without, of being inmates of an aquarium; and a gorgeous tea room done in the style of one of the French Louies—Louie the Limit, I guess. There are some notable exceptions to the rule—some of the places have pleasing individualities of their own, but most of them were cut off the same pattern. Likewise the bulk of their winter patrons are cut off the same pattern.

The average Eastern tourist is a funny biped anyhow, and he is at his funniest out in California. Living along the Eastern seaboard are a large number of well-to-do people who harken not to the slogan of See America First, because many of them cannot see America at any price; they can just barely recognize its existence as a suitable place for making money, but no place for spending it. What makes life worth living to them is the fact that Europe is distant only a four-day run by the four-day boat, the same being known as a four-day boat because only four days are required for the run between Daunt's Rock and Ambrose Channel, which is a very convenient arrangement for deep-sea divers and long-distance swimmers desiring to get on at Daunt's Rock and get off in Ambrose Channel, but slightly extending the journey for passengers who are less amphibious by nature.

These people constitute one breed of Eastern tourists. There is the other breed, who are willing to see America provided it is made over to conform with the accepted Eastern model. Those who can afford the expense go to Florida in the winter; but it requires at least a million in small change to feel at home in that setting, and so a good many who haven't quite a million to spare, head for Southern California as the next best spot on the map. Arriving there, they endeavor to reproduce on as exact a scale as possible the life of the ultra fashionable Florida resorts; the result is what a burlesque manager would call a Number Two Palm Beach company playing the Western Wheel.

Up and down the Coast these tourists traipse for months on end, spending a week here and two weeks there, and doing the same things in the same way at each new stopping place. You meet them, part from them, and meet them again at the next stand, until the monotony of it grows maddening; and always they are intently following the routine you saw them following last week or the week before, or the week before that. They have traveled clear across the continent to practice such diversions as they might have had within two hours' ride of Philadelphia or New York; and they are going to practice them, too, or know the reason why.

Of course they are not all constituted this way; I am speaking now of the impression created in California by tourists in bulk. They decline to do the things for which this country is best adapted; they will not see the things for which it is most famous. Few of them take the roughing trips up into the mountains; fewer still visit the desert country. All about them the tremendous engineering contracts that have made this land a commercial Arabian Nights' Entertainment are being carried out—the mighty reclamation schemes; the irrigation projects; the damming up of canyons and the shoveling away of mountains—but your average group of Eastern tourists pass these by with dull and glazed eyes, their souls being bound up in the desire to reach the next hotel on the route with the least possible waste of time, and take up the routine where it was broken off at the last hotel.

They tennis and they golf, and some go horseback riding and some take drives; and at one or two places there is polo in the season. Likewise, in accordance with the rules laid down by the Palm Beach authorities, the women change clothes as often as possible during the course of the day; and in the evening all hands appear in full dress for dinner, the same being very wearing on men and very pleasing to women—that is, all of them do except a few obstinate persons who defy convention and remain comfortable. After dinner some of the younger people dance and some of the older ones play bridge; but the vast majority sit round—and then sit round some more and wonder whether eleven o'clock will ever come so they can go to bed!

A good many take the wrong kind of clothes out there with them. They have read in the advertisements that Southern California is a land of perpetual balm, where flowers bloom the year round; and they pack their trunks with the lightest and thinnest wearing apparel they own, which is a mistake. The natives know better than that. The all-wool sweater is the national garment of the Western Coast—both sexes and all ages go to it unanimously. Experience proves it the ideal thing to wear; for in Southern California in the winter it is never really hot in the sun and it is often exceedingly cool in the shade. Besides, there is a sea wind that blows pretty regularly and which makes a specialty of working through the crannies in a silk shirt or a lingerie blouse. The chilliest, most pallid-looking things I ever saw in my life were a pair of white linen trousers I found in the top tray of my trunk when I reached the extreme lower end of California. I had to cover them under two blankets and a bedspread that night to keep the poor things from freezing stiff.

The medium-weight garments an Easterner wears between seasons are admirably suited for the West Coast in the winter; but the guileless tenderfoot who is making his first trip to California usually doesn't learn this until it is too late. If he is wise he studies out the situation on his arrival, and thereafter takes his overcoat with him when he goes riding and his sweater when he goes walking; but there are many others who will be summer boys and girls though they perish in the attempt.

At Coronado I witnessed a mighty pitiable sight. It was a cool day, cooler than ordinary even, with a stiff wind blowing skeiny shreds of sea fog in off the gray ocean; and a beating rain was falling at frequent intervals. The veranda was full of Easterners trying to look comfortable in summer clothes and not succeeding, while the road in front was dotted with Westerners, comfortable and cozy in their thick sweaters. There emerged upon the wind-swept porch a youth who would have been a sartorial credit to himself on a Florida beach in February or upon a Jersey board-walk in August; but he did not coincide with the atmospheric scheme of things on a rainy March day down in Southern California.



To begin with, he was a spindly and fragile person, with a knobby forehead and a fade-away face. Dressed in close-fitting black and turned sidewise, with his profile to you, he would instantly suggest a neatly rolled umbrella with a plain bone handle. But he was not dressed in black; he was dressed in white—all white, like a bride or a bandaged thumb; white silk shirt; white flannel coat, with white pearl buttons spangled freely over it; white trousers; white Panama hat; white socks; white buckskin shoes, with white rubber soles on them. He was, in short, all white except his face, which was a pinched, wan blue, and his nose, which was a suffused and chilly red. If my pencil had had an eraser on it I'm satisfied I could have backed him up against the wall and rubbed him right out; but he bore up splendidly.

It was plain he felt that he was properly dressed for the time, the place and the occasion; and to him that was ample compensation for his suffering. I heard afterward that he lost three sets of tennis and had a congestive chill—all in the course of the same afternoon.

The unconquerable determination of the Eastern tourist to have Southern California conform to his back-home standards is responsible for the fact that many of the tourist hotels out there are not so typical of the West as they might be—and as in my humble judgment they should be—but are as Eastern as it is possible to make them—Eastern in cuisine, in charges and in their operating schedules. Here, again, there are some notable exceptions.

In the supposedly wilder sections of the West, lying between the Rockies and the Sierras, the situation is different. It is notably different in Arizona and New Mexico in the South, and in Utah, Montana and Wyoming in the North. There the person who serves you for hire is neither your menial nor your superior; whereas in the East he or she is nearly always one or the other, and sometimes both at once. This particular type of Westerner doesn't patronize you; neither does he cringe to you in expectation of a tip. He gives you the best he has in stock, meanwhile retaining his own self-respect and expecting you to do the same. He ennobles and dignifies personal service.

Out on the Coast, however—or at least at several of the big hotels out on the Coast—the system, thanks to Eastern influence, has been changed. The whole scheme is patterned after the accepted New York model. The charges for small services are as exorbitant as in New York, and the iniquities of the tipping system are worked out as amply and as wickedly as in the city where they originated.

Somebody with a taste for statistics figured it out once that if a man owned a three-dollar hat and wore it for two months, lunching every day at a New York cafe, and if he dined four nights a week at a New York restaurant and attended the theater twice a week, his hat at the end of those two months would cost him in tips eighteen dollars and seventy cents! No, on second thought, I guess it was a pair of earmuffs that would have cost him eighteen-seventy.

A hat would have been more.

It would be more in Southern California—I'm sure of that. There the tipping habit is made more expensive by reason of the prevalent spirit of Western generosity. The born Westerner never has got used to dimes and nickels. To him quarters are still chicken-feed and a half dollar is small change. So the tips are just as numerous as in New York and for the same service they are frequently larger.

A lot has been said and written about the marvelous palms of Lower California and a lot more might be said—for they are outstretched everywhere; and if you don't cross them with silver at frequent intervals you would do well to try camping out for a change. Likewise a cursory glance at the prices on some of the menus is calculated to make a New Yorker homesick—they're so familiarly and unreasonably steep. And frequently the dishes you get aren't typical of the country; they are—thanks again be to the Easterner—mostly transplanted imitations of the concoctions of the Broadway and the Fifth Avenue chefs.

There are compensations, though. There are some hotels that are operated on admirably different lines, and there are abundant opportunities for escaping altogether from hotel life and seeing this Land of the Living Backdrop where it is untainted and unspoiled; where the hills are clothed in green and yellow; where little Spanishy looking towns nestle below the Missions, and the mocking-birds sing, and the real-estate boomer leaps from crag to crag, sounding his flute-like note. And don't forget the climate! But that is unnecessary advice. You won't have a chance to forget it—not for a minute you won't!



IN THE HAUNT OF THE NATIVE SON



In the Haunt of the Native Son

THERE are various ways of entering San Francisco, and the traveling general passenger agent of any one of half a dozen trunklines stands ready to prove to you—absolutely beyond the peradventure of a doubt—that his particular way is incomparably the best one; but to my mind a very satisfactory way is to go overland from Monterey.

The route we followed led us lengthwise through the wonderful Santa Clara country, straight up a wide box plait of valley tucked in between an ornamental double ruffle of mountains. I suppose if we passed one ranch we passed a thousand—cattle ranches, fruit ranches, hen ranches, chicken ranches, bee ranches—all the known varieties and subvarieties.

In California you mighty soon get out of the habit of speaking of farms; for there are no farms—only ranches. The particular ranch to which you have reference may be a ten-thousand-acre ranch, where they raise enough beef critters to feed a standing army, or it may be a half-acre ranch, where somebody is trying to make things home-like and happy for eight hens and a rooster; but a ranch it always is, and usually it is a model of its kind, too. The birds in California do not build nests. They build ranches.

Most of the way along the Santa Clara Valley our tires glided upon an arrow-straight, unbelievably smooth stretch of magnificent automobile road, which—when it is completed—will extend without a break from the Oregon line to the Mexican line, and will be the finest, costliest, best thoroughfare to be found within the boundaries of any state of the Union, that being the scale upon which they work out their public-utility plans in the West.

Eventually the road changes into a paved and curbed avenue, lined with seemingly unending aisles of the tall gum trees. Soon you begin to skitter past the suburban villas of rich men, set back in ornamental landscape effects of green lawns and among tropical verdure. You emerge from this into a gently rolling plateau, upon which flower gardens of incomparable richness are interspersed with the homely structures that inevitably mark the proximity of any great city. There, rising ahead of you, are the foothills that protect, upon its landward side, San Francisco, the city that has produced more artists, more poets, more writers, more actors, more pugilists, more sudden millionaires—cries of Question! Question! from the Pittsburgh delegation—more good fiction and more Native Sons than any community in the Western Hemisphere.

You aren't there yet, however. Next you round a sloping shoulder of a hill and slide down into a shore road, with the beating, creaming surf on one side, and on the other a long succession of the sort of architectural triumphs that have made Coney Island famous. You negotiate another small ridge and there, suddenly spread out before you, is the Golden Gate, with the city itself cuddled in between the ocean and the friendly protecting mountains at its back. The Seal Rocks are there, and the Cliff House, and the Presidio, and all. New York has a wonderful harbor entrance; Nature did some of it and man did the rest. San Francisco has an even more wonderful one, and the hand of man did not need to touch it. When Nature got through with it, it was a complete and satisfactory job.

The first convincing impression the newcomer gets of San Francisco is that here is a permanent city—a city that has found itself, has achieved its own personality, and is satisfied with it. Perhaps, because they are growing so fast, certain of the other Coast cities strike the casual observer as having just been put up. I was told that a man who lives on a residential street of San Diego has to mark his house with chalk when he leaves of a morning in order to know it when he gets home at night. A real-estate agent told me so, and I do not think a Southern California real-estate agent would deceive anybody—more particularly a stranger from the East. So it must be true. And Los Angeles' main business district is like a transverse slice chopped out of the middle of Manhattan Island. It isn't Western. It is typically New Yorky—as alive as New York and as handsomely done. You can almost imagine you are at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street.

San Francisco, it seems to me, isn't like any city on earth except San Francisco. Once you get away from the larger hotels, which are accurate copies of the metropolitan article of the East, even to the afternoon tea-fighting melees of the women, you find yourself in a city that is absolutely individual and distinctive. It impresses its originality upon you; it presents itself with an air of having been right there from the beginning—and this, too, in spite of the fact that the ravages of the great fire are still visible in old cellar excavations and piles of debris. Practically every building in the main part of the town has been rebuilt within eight years and is still new. The scars are fresh, but the spirit is old and abides.

This same essence of individuality tinctures the lives, the manners and the conversations of the people. They do not strike you as being Westerners or as being transplanted Easterners; they are San Franciscans. Even when all other signs fail you may, nevertheless, instantly discern certain unfailing traits—to wit, as follows: 1—A San Franciscan shudders with ill-concealed horror when anybody refers to his beloved city as Frisco—which nobody ever does unless it be a raw alien from the other side of the continent; 2—He does not brag of the climate with that constancy which provides his neighbor of Los Angeles a never-failing topic of congenial conversation; and 3—He assures you with a regretful sighing note in his voice that the old-time romance disappeared with the destruction of the old-time buildings, the old-time resorts and the old-time neighborhoods.

It has been my experience that romance is always in the past tense anyhow. Romance is a commodity that was extremely plentiful last week or last year or last century, but for the moment they are entirely out of it, and can't say with any degree of certainty when a fresh stock will be coming in. This is largely true of all the formerly romantic cities I know anything about, and it appears to be especially true of San Francisco. Romance invariably acquires added value after it has vanished; in this respect it is very much like a history-making epoch. An epoch rarely seems to create any great amount of excitement when it is in process of epoching, or at least the excitement is only temporary and soon abates. Afterward we look back upon it with a feeling of longing, but when it was actually coming to pass we took it—after the first shock of surprise—as a matter of course.

No doubt our children and our children's children will read in the text-books that the first decade of the twentieth century was distinguished as the age when the auto and tango came into use, and people learned to fly, and grown men wore bracelet watches and carried their handkerchiefs up their cuffs; and they will repine because they, too, did not live in those stirring times. But we of the present generation who recently passed through these experiences have already accepted them without undue excitement, just as our forefathers in their day accepted the submarine cable, the galvanic battery and the congress gaiter.



Age and antiquity give an added value to everything except an egg. In my own case I know how it was with regard to the Egyptian scarab. For years I felt that I could never rest satisfied until I had gone to Egypt and had personally broken into the tomb of some sleeping Pharaoh or some crumbly old Rameses, and with my own hands had ravished from it a mummified specimen of that fabled beetle which the ancients worshiped and buried with them in their tombs. But not long ago I made the discovery that, in coloring, habits, customs and general walk and conversation, the scarab of the Egyptians was none other than the common tumblebug of the Southern dirt roads. Right there was where I lost interest in the scarab. He was no novelty to me—not after that he wasn't. As a boy I had known him intimately.

So, when I was repeatedly assured that the old-time romance had vanished from San Francisco, and with it the atmosphere that bred Bohemianism and developed literature and art, and kept alive the spirit of the Forty-niner times, and all that, I made my own allowances. Those who mourned for the fire-blasted past may have been right, in a measure. Certainly the old-time Chinatown isn't there any more—or, at any rate, isn't there in its physical aspects. The rebuilt Chinatown of San Francisco, though infinitely larger, isn't so picturesque really or so Chinesey looking as New York's Chinatown.

I did not dare to give utterance to this treasonable statement until I was well away from San Francisco, but it is true all the same. I cruised the shores of the far-famed and much-written-about Barbary Coast; and it seemed to me that in its dun-colored tiresomeness and in its miserable transparent counterfeit of joy it was up to the general metropolitan average—that it was just as tiresome and humdrum as the avowedly wicked section of any city always is.

However, I was told that I had arrived just one week too late to see the Barbary Coast at its best—meaning by that its worst; for during the week before the police, growing virtuous, had put the crusher on the dance-halls and the hobble on the tango-twisters. Even the place where the turkey trot originated—a place that would naturally be a shrine to a New Yorker—was trotless and quiet—in mourning for its firstborn.

The so-called French restaurants, which for years gave an unwholesome savor to certain phases of San Francisco life, had likewise been sterilized and purified. I wished I might have got there before the housecleaning took place; but, even so, I should probably have been disappointed. What makes the vice of ancient Babylon seem by contrast more seductive to us than the vice of the Bowery is that Babylon is gone and the Bowery isn't.

Likewise the night life of San Francisco, of which in times past I had read so much, was disillusionizing, because it wasn't visible to the naked eye. On this proposition Los Angeles puts it all over San Francisco; for this, though, there is an easy explanation. Los Angeles boasts what is said to be the completest trolley system in the world; undoubtedly it is the noisiest in the world. The tracks seem to run through every street; there is a curve at every corner, I think, and a switch in the middle of every block. Every thirty seconds or so a car comes along, and it always comes at top speed and takes the curve without slackening up; and the motorman is always clanging his gong in a whole-souled manner that would entitle him to membership in the Swiss Bellringers.

Naturally the folks in Los Angeles stay up late—they can't figure on doing much sleeping anyhow; but either San Francisco has fewer trolley cars to the acre or else the motormen are not quite so musically inclined, and people may get to bed at a Christian hour. Most of them do it, too, if I am one to judge. At night in San Francisco I didn't see a single owl lunch wagon or meet a single beggar. Newsboys were remarkably scarce and taxicabs seemed to be few and far between. These things help to make any other city; without them San Francisco still manages to be a city—another proof of her individuality.

The old romance of the Old San Francisco may be dead and buried—the residents unite in saying that it is, and they ought to know; but, even so, New San Francisco may well brag today of a greater romance than any it ever knew—the romance of achievement. Somebody said not long ago that the greatest of all monuments to American pluck was San Francisco rebuilt; but if there was pluck in it there was romance too. And there is romance, plenty of it, in the exposition these people have planned and are now carrying out to commemorate the opening of the Panama Canal.

To begin with, citizens of San Francisco and of the state of California are paying the whole bill themselves—they did not ask the Federal Government to contribute a red cent of the millions being spent and that will be spent, and to date the Federal Government has not contributed a red cent either. Climatic conditions are in their favor. Other expositions have had to contend with hot weather—sometimes with beastly hot weather; those other expositions could not open up until well into the spring, and they closed perforce with the coming of cold weather in the fall. But San Francisco is never very hot and never really cold, and California becomes an out-of-door land as soon as the rains end; so this fair will be actively and continuously in operation for nine months instead of being limited to four or five months as the period of its greatest activities.

Then, again, there is another advantage—the exposition grounds are situated well within the city; the site is within easy riding distance of the civic center and not miles away from the middle of town, as has been the case in certain other instances in this country where big expositions were held. It is a place admirably devised by Nature for the purposes to which it is now being put—a six-hundred-acre tract stretching along the water-front, with the Presidio at its farther end, the high hills behind it, and in front of it the exquisite panorama of the Golden Gate, with emerald islands rising beyond; and Berkeley and Oakland just across the way; and on beyond, northward across the narrowing portals of the harbor, the big green mountain of Tamalpais, rising sheer out of the sea.

Moreover, the president of the exposition and his aides promised that the whole thing, down to the minutest detail, would be completed and ready months before the date set for opening the gates—which furnishes another strikingly novel note in expositions, if their words come true; and they declared that, for beauty of conception and harmony of design, their exposition of 1915 would surpass any exposition ever seen in this country or in any other country. Probably they are right. I know that, when I was there, the view from the first rise back of the grounds, looking down upon that long flat where men by thousands were toiling, and building after building was rising, made a picture sufficiently inspiring to warm the enthusiasm and brisken the imagination of any man, be he alien or native.

There isn't any doubt, though, that the people of San Francisco are going to have their hands full when the exposition visitors begin to pile in. By that I do not mean that the housing and feeding accommodations and the transit facilities will be deficient; but it is going to be a most overpoweringly big job to educate the pilgrims up to the point where they will call San Francisco by its full name. All true San Franciscans are very touchy on this point—touchy as hedgehogs, they are; the prejudice extends to all classes, with the possible exception of the Chinese.

I heard a story of a seafaring person, ignorant and newly arrived, who drifted into a waterfront saloon, called for a simple glass of beer and spoke a few casual words of greeting to the barkeeper—and woke up the next morning in the hospital with a very bad headache and a bandage round his throbbing brows. It developed that he had three times in rapid succession referred to the city as Frisco, and on being warned against this practice had inquired:

"Well, wot do you want me to call her—plain Fris?"

That was the last straw. The barkeeper took a bung-starter and felled him as flat as a felled seam—and all present agreed that it served him right.

An even worse breach of etiquette on the part of the outlander is to intimate that an earthquake preceded the great fire. That is positively the unforgivable sin! In any quarter of the city you could get many subscriptions for a fund to buy something with silver handles on it for any man who would insist upon talking of earthquakes. To make my meaning clearer, I will state that there are only two objects of general use in the civilized world that have silver handles on them, and one of them is a loving cup; but this article would not be a loving cup. A native will willingly concede that there was a fire, which burned its memories deep into the consciousness of the city that recovered from it with such splendid courage and such inconceivable rapidity; but by common consent there was nothing else. It does not take the stranger long to get this point of view, either.

If I were in charge of the publicity work of the San Francisco Fair I should advertise two attractions that would surely appeal to all the women in this country, and to most of the men. In my press work I would dwell at length upon the fact that in this part of California a woman may wear any weight and any style of clothes—spring clothes, summer clothes, fall clothes or winter clothes—and not only be perfectly comfortable while so doing, but be in the fashion besides; and to be in the fashion is a thing calculated to make a woman comfortable whether she otherwise is or not.

To see a group of four women promenading a San Francisco street on a pleasant morning is to be reminded of that ballet representing the Four Seasons, which we used to see in the second act of every well-regulated extravaganza. The woman nearest the walls has on her furs—it is always cool in the shade; the one next to her is wearing the very latest wrinkles in spring garniture; the third one, let us say, is dressed in the especially becoming frock she bought last October; and the one on the outside, where the sun shines the brightest, is as summery in her white ducks and her white slippers as though she had just stepped off the cover of the August number of a magazine. There is something, too, about the salt-laden breezes of San Francisco that gives women wonderful complexions; that detail, properly press-agented, ought to fetch the entire female population of the United States.



For drawing the men, I would exploit the great cardinal fact that nowhere in the country—not even in Norfolk or Baltimore or New Orleans—can you get better things to eat than in San Francisco. For its size, I believe there are more good clubs and more good restaurants right there than in any other spot on the habitable globe. Particularly in the preparation of the typical dishes of the Coast do the San Francisco cooks excel; their cuisine is based on a sane American foundation, with a delectable suggestion of the Spanish in it, and sometimes with a traceable suggestion of the best there is in the Italian and the Chinese schools of cookery.

To one whose taste in oysters has been developed by eating the full-chested bi-valve of the Eastern seaboard and the deep-lunged, long-bodied product of the Louisiana bayous, the native oyster does not greatly appeal. A lot has been written and printed about the California oyster, but in my opinion he will always have considerable difficulty in living up to his press notices. It takes about a thousand of him to make a quart and about a hundred of him to make a taste. Even then he doesn't taste much like a real oyster, but more like an infinitesimal scrap of sponge where a real oyster camped out overnight once.

There is a dream of a little fish, however, called a sand dab—he is a tiny, flounder-shaped titbit hailing from deep water; and for eating purposes he is probably the best fish that swims—better even than the pompano of the Gulf—and when you say that you are saying about all there is to be said for a fish. And the big crabs of the Pacific side are the hereditary princes of the crab family. They look like spread-eagles; and properly prepared they taste like Heaven. I often wonder what the crabsters buy one-half so precious as the stuff they sell—which is a quotation from Omar, with original interpolations by me. The domestic cheese of the Sierras is not without its attractions also, whether you eat it fresh or whether you keep it until its general aspect and prevalent atmosphere are such as to satisfy even one of those epicurean cheese-eaters who think that no cheese is fit to eat until you can't.

Another thing worthy of mention in connection with this California school of cookery is that you can pay as little as you please for your dinner or as much as you please. There are three standbys of the exchange editor that may be counted upon to appear in the newspapers about once in so often. One is the hoary-headed and toothless tale regarding the artist who was hired to renovate religious paintings in a church in Brussels, and turned in an itemized account including such entries as—"Correcting the Ten Commandments"; "Restoring the Lost Souls"; "Renewing Heaven"; and winding up with "Doing Several Odd Jobs for the Damned."

The second of the set comes out of retirement at frequent intervals—whenever some trusting soul runs across a time-stained number of the Ulster Gazette giving details of the death of George Washington—I wonder how many million copies of that venerable counterfeit were printed—and writes in to his home editor about it.

And the third, the most popular clipping of the three, concerns the prices that used to govern at the mining camps in the days of the early gold rush. The story that is most commonly quoted has to do with the menu of the El Dorado Hotel, at Placerville, where bean soup was a dollar a plate; hash, lowgrade, seventy-five cents; hash, eighteen-carat, a dollar—and so on down the list to seventy-five cents for two Irish potatoes, peeled.

The cost of living may have gone down subsequently in those parts, but it has gone back up again—at certain favored spots. If the Argonauts, those hardy adventurers who flung their gold round so regardlessly and were not satisfied unless they paid outrageously big prices for everything, could come back today they would have no cause to complain at the contemptible paucity of the bill after they had dined at any one of half a dozen ultra-expensive hotels that are to be found dotted along the Coast.

I append herewith a few items selected at random from the price card of a fashionable establishment in one of the larger Coast cities: caviar imperial d'Astracan, two dollars for a double portion; buffet Russe—whatever that is—ninety cents; German asparagus, a single helping, one dollar and forty cents; blue-point oysters, fifty cents; fifty cents for clams; Gorgonzola cheese, fifty cents a portion; and, in a land where peaches and figs grow anywhere and everywhere, seventy-five cents for an order of brandied peaches and fifty cents for an order of spiced figs. Even seasoned New Yorkers have been known to breathe hard on receiving a check for a full meal at certain restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

On the other hand, you can step round any corner in San Francisco and walk into that institution which people in other large cities are forever seeking and never finding—a table-d'hote restaurant where a perfect meal is to be had at a most moderate price. The best Italian restaurant in the world—and I wish to say, after personal experience, that Sunny Italy itself is not barred—is a little place on the fringe of the Barbary Coast.

There is another place not far away where, for a dollar, you get a bottle of good domestic wine and a selection from the following range of dishes: Celery, ripe olives, green olives, radishes, onions, lettuce, sliced tomatoes, combination salad or crab-meat salad; soup—onion or consomme; fish—sole, salmon, bass, sand dabs, mussels or clams; entrees—sweetbreads with mushrooms, curry of lamb, calf's tongue, tripe with peppers, tagliatini a l'Italienne, or boiled kidney with bacon; vegetables—asparagus, string-beans and cauliflower; roast—spring lamb with green peas, broiled chicken or broiled pig's feet; dessert—rhubarb pie, ice cream and cake, apple sauce, stewed fruits, baked pear or baked apple, mixed fruits; cheese of three varieties, and coffee to wind up on.

The proprietor doesn't cut out his portions with a pair of buttonhole scissors, either, or sauce them with a medicine-dropperful of gravy. He gives a big, full, satisfying helping, well cooked and well served. There is some romance in the San Francisco cooking, too, if the oldtimers who bemourn the old days only realized it.

If this seeming officiousness on the part of a passing wayfarer may be excused there is one more suggestion I should like to throw off for the benefit of the promoters of the exposition. Living somewhere in California is a man who should be looked up before the gates are opened, and he should be retained at a salary and staked out in suitable quarters as a special and added attraction. He is the most magnificent fish-liar in the known world! I do not know his name—he was so busy pouring fish stories down a party of us that he didn't take time to stop and tell his name—but no great difficulty should be experienced in finding him. There is only one of him alive—these world's wonders never occur in pairs. That would cheapen them and make them commonplace.

He swam into our ken—if a mixed metaphor may be pardoned—on a train leaving Oakland for the East. We were sitting in the club car—half a dozen or so of us—when he drifted along. At first look no one would have suspected him of being so gifted a creature as he proved himself to be. He was a round, short, tub-shaped man, with a button nose, and a double chin that ran all the way round and lapped over at the back. But, though his appearance was deceiving, anybody could tell with half an eye that he excelled in extemporaneous conversation. Right off he began shadow-boxing and sparring about, waiting for an opening. In a minute he got it.

The tall man with the long face and the stiff white pompadour, who looked like a patent toothbrush, gave him his chance. The tall man happened to look out of the car window and see in an inlet a fleet of beached fishing boats, and he remarked on their picturesqueness. That was the cue.

"Speaking of fishing," said the button-nosed man, "I'll tell you people something that'll maybe interest you. You may not believe it, either, me being a stranger to you; but it's the Gospel truth or I wouldn't be sitting here a-telling it. I reckon I've done more fishing in my day and more different kinds of fishing than any man alive. I come originally from a prime fishing state—Michigan—and I've lived in Colorado and Montana and Oregon and all the other good fishing states out West. But, take it from me, friends, California is the best fishing state there is. Yes, sir; when it comes to fishing, old California lays it over 'em all—she takes the rag right off the bush! I'm the one that oughter know because I've fished her from end to end and crossways—sea fishing, creek fishing, lake fishing and all.

"Down at Catalina they'll tell you, if you ask 'em, that I'm the man that ketched the biggest tuna that ever come out of that ocean. It took me fourteen hours and forty-five minutes to land him, and during that time he towed me and an eighteen-foot boat, and the fellow I had along for boatman, over forty-four miles—I measured it afterward to be sure—and the friction of the reel spinning round wore my line down till it wasn't no thicker in places than a cobweb. But tunas ain't my regular specialty—trouts and basses are my special favorites; and up in the mountains is where I mostly do my fishing.

"I'm just sort of hanging round now waiting for the snow to move out so's I can go up there and start fishing.

"Well, sirs, it's funny, ain't it, the way luck will run fishing? Oncet when I was living up there I fished stiddy, day in and day out, for two seasons and never got a bite that you could rightly call a bite. And then all of a sudden one afternoon the luck switched and in exactly forty-five minutes by the watch—by this here very watch I'm carrying now in my pocket—I ketched seventy-two of them big old black basses out of one hole; and they averaged five pounds apiece!"

We looked at one another silently. A total of seventy-two five-pound bass in three-quarters of an hour seemed a little too much to be taken as a first dose from a strange practitioner. And it was hard to believe they had all been basses; if only for the sake of variety there should have been at least one barytone. We felt that we needed time for reflection—and digestion.

Evidently realizing this, one of our number undertook to throw himself into the breach. As I recollect, this volunteer was the fat coffin drummer from Des Moines who had the round, smooth face and the round, bald head, and wore the fuzzy green hat with the bow at the back. I think he wore the bow there purposely—it simplified matters so when you were trying to decide which side of his head his face grew on. He heaved a pensive sigh out of his system and remarked upon the clearness of the air in these parts.

"You're right there, mister," broke in the button-nosed man, snapping him up instantly. "The air is tolerable clear here today; but you oughter to see the air up in the mountains! Why, it's so clear up there it would make this here hill-country air look like a fog. I remember oncet I was browsing along a cliff up in that country, toting my fishpole, and I happened to look over the bluff—just so—and down below I saw a hole in the creek that was just crawling with them big trouts—steel-head trouts and rainbow trouts. I could see the spots on their sides and their fins waving, and their gills working up and down.

"I figured out that it was fully a hundred feet down to the water and the water would natchelly be tolerable deep; so I let all my line run off the reel, a hundred and sixty feet of it; and I fished and fished and fished—and didn't get a strike, let alone a nibble. Yet I could look over and see all these hungry trouts down below looking up with expectant looks in their eyes—I could see their eyes—and jumping round regardless; and yet not a bite! So I changed bait—changed from live bait to dead bait, and back again to live—and still there wasn't nothing doing. So I says to myself: 'Something's wrong, sure! This thing'll stand looking into.'



"So I snoops round and finds a place where there's a sort of a sloping place in the bluff; and I braces my pole in a rock and leaves it there; and I climbs down—and then I sees what's the matter. It was that there clear air that had fooled me! It was three hundred feet if it was an inch down from the top of that there bluff to the creek, and the hole was fully a hundred feet deep—maybe more; and away down at the plumb bottom all them trouts was congregated in a circlelike, looking up mighty greedy and longing at my bait, which was a live frog, dangling two hundred and forty-odd feet up in the air. But, speaking of clear air, that wasn't nothing at all compared to some other things I could tell you about. Another time——"

At this point I rose and escaped to the diner. When I got back at the end of an hour the other survivors told me that, up to the time he got off at Sacramento, the button-nosed man had been getting better and better all the time. He certainly ought to be rounded up and put on exhibition at the Fair to show those puny and feeble Eastern fish-liars what the incomparable Western climate can produce.

I almost forgot to mention San Francisco's chief product—Native Sons. A Native Son is one who has acquired special merit by being born in the state. You would think credit would be given to the subject's parents, where it belongs; but, no—that is not the California way. It's a great thing out there to be a Native Son. It counts in politics, and in society, and at the clubs.

And, after that, the next best thing is to be a Southerner, either by birth or descent. People who have Southern blood in their veins are very proud of it and can join a club on the strength of it; and some of them do a lot of talking about it. The definition is rather elastic—anybody whose ancestors worked on the Southern Pacific is eligible, I think.

Of course, there are a lot of real Southerners; but there are a whole lot more who—so it seemed to me—are giving remarkably realistic imitations of the type known in New York as the Professional Southerner. San Francisco excels in Southerners—the regular kind and the self-made kind both.

I was out there too early in the year to meet the justly celebrated San Francisco flea. He's a Native Son, too; but there isn't so much bragging being done on his account.



LOOKING FOR LO



Looking for Lo

IF it is your desire to observe the Red Indian of the Plains engaged in his tribal sports and pastimes wait for the Wild West Show; there is sure to be one coming to your town before the season is over. Or if you are bloodthirsty by nature and yearn to see him prancing round upon the warpath, destroying the hated paleface and strewing the soil with his shredded fragments, restrain your longings until next fall and then arrange to take in the football game between Carlisle and Princeton. But, whatever you do, do not go journeying into the Far West in the hope of finding him in great number upon his native heath, for the chances are that you won't find him there in great number; and if you do he will probably be a considerable disappointment to you; because, unless he is paid for it, the red brother absolutely declines to be picturesque.

I am reliably informed that he is still reasonably numerous in Oklahoma, in North and South Dakota, and in Montana and Washington; but my itinerary did not include those states. I did not see a live Indian—that is to say, a live Indian recognizable as such—in Nevada or in Colorado or in Utah, or in a four-hour run across one corner of Wyoming.

In upward of a thousand miles of travel through California I saw just one Indian—a bronze youth of perhaps twenty summers and, I should say, possibly half that many baths. He was wearing the scenario of a pair of overalls and a straw hat in an advanced state of decrepitude, and he was working in a truckpatch; if a native had not told me what he was I would have passed him by for a sunburnt hired hand.

I saw a few Indians in New Mexico and a few more in Arizona, but not a great many at that; and these, as I found out later, were mainly engaged to linger in the vicinity of stations and hotels along the line for the purpose of adding a touch of color to the surroundings and incidentally selling souvenirs to the tourists.

Mind you, I'm not saying there are not plenty of Indians in those states; but they mostly stay on their reservations and the reservations unfortunately are not, as a rule, near the railroad stations. A traveler going through the average small Southern town sees practically the entire strength of the colored citizenry gathered at the depot and jumps at the conclusion that the population is from ninety to ninety-five per cent. black. In the West he sees maybe one little Indian settlement in a stretch of five or six hundred miles, and he figures that the Indian is practically an extinct species.

Of course, though, he is not extinct. In these piping commercial days of acute competition he has no time to be gallivanting down to the depot every time a through train rolls in, especially as the depot is frequently eighty or ninety miles distant from his domicile. He is closely confined at home turning out souvenirs. It is a pity, too, that he cannot spare more of his time for this simple and inexpensive pleasure. In one week's study of the passing tourist breed he could see enough funny sights and hear enough funny things—unintentionally funny things—to keep his family entertained on many a long winter's evening as they sit peacefully in the wigwam making knickknacks for the Eastern trade.



No, sirree! Those Southwestern tribes are far from being extinct—especially the Navajos. You can, in a way, approximate the tribal strength of the Navajos by the number of Navajo blankets you see. From Colorado to the Coast the Navajo blanket carpets the earth. I'll bet any amount within reason that in six weeks' time I saw ten million Navajo blankets if I saw one. As for other things—bows and arrows, for example—well, I do not wish to exaggerate; but had I bought all the wooden bows and arrows that were offered to me I could take them and build a rustic footbridge across the Delaware River at Trenton, with a neat handrail all the way over. Taking the figures of the last census as a working basis I calculate that each Navajo squaw weaves, on an average, nine thousand blankets a year; and while she is so engaged her husband, the metal worker of the establishment, is producing a couple of tons of silver bracelets set with turquoises. For prolixity of output I know of no female in the entire animal kingdom that can compare with the Navajo squaw—unless it is the lady Potomac shad.

Right here I wish to claim one proud distinction: I went from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again—and I did not buy a single blanket! Since the return of the Lewis & Clark expedition I am probably the only white person who has ever done this. Goodness knows the call was strong enough and the opportunities abundant enough; blankets were available for my inspection at every railroad station, at every hotel, and at every one of two hundred thousand souvenir stores that I encountered—but I was under orders from headquarters.

As we were bidding farewell to our family before starting West, our wife said to us in firm, decided accents: "I have already picked out a place where we can hide the Cheyenne war-bonnet. We can get rid of the moccasins and the stone hatchets and the beadwork breastplates by storing them in a trunk up in the attic. But do not bring a Navajo blanket back to this already crowded establishment!" So we restrained ourselves. But it was a hard struggle and took a heroic effort.

I recall one blanket, done in gray and black and red and white, and decorated with the figures of the Thunder Bird and the Swastika, the Rising Sun and the Jig Saw, and other Indian signs, symbols and emblems. It was with the utmost difficulty that I wrenched myself away from the vicinity of this treasure. And then, when I got back home, feeling proud as Punch over having withstood temptation in all its forms, almost the first words I heard, spoken in tones of deep disappointment, were these: "Well, why didn't you bring a Navajo blanket for the den? You know we've always wanted one!" Wasn't that just like a woman?

Though I refrained from seeking bargains in the blankets of the aborigine, I sought diligently enough for the aborigine himself. I had my first glimpse of him in Northern New Mexico just after we had come down out of Colorado. Accompanied by his lady, he was languidly reposing on the platform in front of a depot, with his wares tastefully arranged at his feet. As a concession to the acquired ideals of the Eastern visitor he had a red sofa tidy draped round his shoulders, and there was a tired-looking hen-feather caught negligently in his back hair; and his squaw displayed ornamented leggings below the hems of her simple calico walking skirt. But these adornments, I gathered, constituted the calling costume, so to speak.

When at home in his village the universal garment of the Pueblo male is the black sateen shirt of commerce. He puts it on and wears it until it is taken up by absorption, and then it is time to put on another. These shirts do not require washing; but, among the best Pueblo families, I understand it is customary—once in so often—to have them searched. And thus is the wild life of the West kept down.

Farther along the line, in Arizona, we met the Hopi and the Navajo—delegations from both of these tribes having been imported from the reservations to give an added touch of picturesqueness to the principal hotel of the Grand Canon. The Hopi, who excels at snake dancing and pottery work, is a mannerly little chap; and his daughter, with her hair done up in elaborate whorl effects in fancied imitation of the squash blossom—the squash being the Hopi emblem of purity—is a decidedly attractive feature of the landscape.

The Hopi women are industrious little bodies, clever at basket weaving—and the men work, too, when not engaged in attending lodge; for the Hopis are the ritualists of the Southwest, and every Hopi is a confirmed joiner. Their secret societies exist to-day, uncorrupted and unchanged, just as they have survived for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. In the Hopi House at Grand Canon there is a reproduction of a kiva or underground temple. It isn't underground—it is located upstairs; but in all other regards it is supposed to conform exactly to one of the real ceremonial chambers of the Hopis. The dried-mud walls are covered thickly with symbolic devices, painted on; and there is an altar tricked out with totems of the Powamu clan, one of the biggest of these societies.

Just in front of the altar, with its wooden figures of the War God, the God of Growing Things, and the God of Thunder, is a sand painting set in the floor like a mosaic. When one of the clans is getting ready for a service the official high priest or medicine man of that particular clan sprinkles clean brown sand upon the flat earth before the altar and upon this foundation, by trickling between his thumb and forefinger tiny streams of sands of other colors, he makes the mystic figures that he worships. After the rites are over he obliterates the design with his hand, leaving the space bare for the next clan.

In the Hopi House at Grand Canon a sand painting sacred to the Antelope clan is preserved under glass for the benefit of visitors. The manager of the establishment, a Mr. Smith, who has spent most of his life among the tribes of Arizona, told us a story about this.

Two years ago this summer, a party of Mystic Shriners on an excursion visited the canyon. Mr. Smith chaperoned one group of them on their tour through the Hopi House. In the sand painting of the kiva they seemed to find something that particularly interested them. They put their heads together, talking in undertones and pointing—so Smith said—first at one design and then at another. An old Hopi buck, a priest of the Antelope clan, was lounging in the low doorway watching them. What the Shriners said to one another could have had no significance for him, even admitting that he heard them, for he did not understand a word of English; but suddenly he reached forth a withered hand and plucked Smith by the sleeve. I am letting Smith tell the rest of the tale just as he told it to us:

"The Hopi pointed to one of the Shriners, an elderly man who came, I think, from somewhere in Illinois, and in his own tongue he said to me: 'That man with the white hair is a Hopi—and he is a member of my clan!' I said to him: 'You speak foolishness—that man comes from the East and never until to-day saw a Hopi in his whole life!' The medicine man showed more excitement than I ever saw an Indian show.

"'You are lying to me!' he said. 'That white-haired man is a Hopi, or else his people long ago were Hopis.' I laughed at him and that ruffled his dignity and he turned away, and I couldn't get another word out of him.

"As the Shriners were passing out I halted the white-haired man and said to him: 'The Hopi medicine man insists that you are a Hopi and that you know something about his clan.' 'Well,' he said, 'I'm no Hopi; but I think I do know something about some of the things he seems to revere. Where is this medicine man?'

"I pointed to where the old Indian was squatted in a corner, sulking; he walked right over to him and motioned to him, and the Hopi got up and they went into the kiva together. I do not know what passed between them—certainly no words passed—but in about ten minutes the Shriner came out, and he had a puzzled look on his face.

"'I've just had the most wonderful experience,' he said to me, 'that I've ever had in my whole life. Of course that Indian isn't a Mason, but in a corrupted form he knows something about Masonry; and where he learned it I can't guess. Why, there are lodges in this country where I actually believe he could work his way in.'"

Not being either a Mason or a Hopi, I cannot undertake to vouch for the story or to contradict it; but Smith has the reputation of being a truthful man.

The Navajos are the aristocrats of the Southwestern country. They are dignified, cleanly in their personal habits, and orderly; and they are wonderful artisans. In addition to being wonderful weavers and excellent silversmiths, they shine at agriculture and at stock raising and sheep raising. They are born horse-traders, too, and at driving a bargain it is said a buck Navajo can spot a Scotchman five balls any time and beat him out; but they have the name of being absolutely honest and absolutely truthful.

This same Mr. Smith, who has lived several years on the Navajo reservation and who is an adopted member of the tribe, took several of us to pay a formal call upon a Navajo subchief, who spends the tourist season at the Grand Canon. The old chap, long-haired and the color of a prime smoke-cured ham, received us with perfect courtesy into his winter residence, the same being a circular hut contrived by overlapping timbers together in a kind of basket design and then coating the logs inside and out with adobe clay.

The place was clean and free from all unpleasant odors. In the middle of the floor a fire burned, the smoke escaping through a hole in the roof. At one side was the primitive forge, where the head of the house worked in metals; and against the far wall his squaw was hunkered down, weaving a blanket on her wooden loom. A couple of his young offspring were playing about, dressed simply in their little negligee-strings. The mud walls were hung with completed blankets. Long, stringy strips of dried beef and mutton—the national dishes of the tribe—were dangling from cross-pieces overhead; and on a rug upon the earthen floor lay a glittering pile of bracelets and brooches that had been made by the old man out of Mexican dollars. When we came away, after spending fifteen minutes or so as their guests, the whole family came with us; but the old man tarried a minute to fasten a small brass padlock through a hasp upon his wattled wooden door.

"Up on the reservation, away from the railroads and the towns, there are no locks upon the doors," Smith said.

"Why is that?" I asked.

Smith grinned. "I'll tell the old man what you said and let him answer."

He clucked in guttural monosyllables to the chief, and the chief clucked back briefly, meanwhile eyeing me with a whimsical squint out of his puckered old eyes. And then Smith translated:

"Why should we lock our doors in the place where we live? There are no white men there!"

I will confess that as a representative of the dominant Caucasian stock I had, for the moment, no apt reply ready. Later I thought of a very fitting retort, which undoubtedly would have flattened that impertinent Indian as flat as a flounder; unfortunately, though, it only came to me after several days of study, and by that time I was upward of a thousand miles away from him. But I am saving it to use on him the next time I go back to the Grand Canon. No mere Indian can slander our race, even if he is telling the truth—not while I'm around!

Down in Southern California I rather figured on finding a large swarm of Mission Indians clustering about every Mission; but, alas! they weren't there, either. We saw a few worshipers and plenty of tourists, but no Indians—at least, I didn't see any personally. There is something wonderfully impressive about a first trip to any one of those old gray churches; everything about it is eloquent with memories of that older civilization which this Western country knew long before the Celt and the Anglo-Saxon breeds came over the Divide and down the Pacific Slope, filled with their lust for gold and lands, craving ever more power and more territory over which to float the Stars and Stripes.

The vanished day of the Spaniard now lives only within the walls of the early Missions, but it invests them with that added veneration which attaches to whatever is old and traditional and historic. We haven't a great deal that is very old in our own country; maybe that explains why we fuss over it so when we come across it in Europe.



There is one Mission which in itself, it seemed to me, is almost worth a trip clear across the continent to see—the one at Santa Barbara. It is up the side of a gentle foothill, with the mountains of the Coast Range behind it. Down below the roofs and spires of a brisk little city show through green clumpage, and still farther beyond the blue waters of the Pacific may be seen.

Parts of this Mission are comparatively new; there are retouchings and restorations that date back only sixty or seventy years, but most of it speaks to you of an earlier century than this and an earlier race than the one that now peoples the land. You pass through walls of solid masonry that are sixteen feet thick and pierced by narrow passages; you climb winding stairs to a squat tower where sundry cracked brazen bells, the gifts of Spanish gentlemen who died a hundred years ago perhaps, swing by withes of ancient rawhide from great, worm-gnawed, hand-riven beams; you walk through the Mission burying-ground, past crumbly old family vaults with half-obliterated names and titles and dates upon their ovenlike fronts, and you wander at will among the sunken individual graves under the palms and pepper trees.

Most convincing of all to me were the stone-flagged steps at the door of the church itself, for they are all worn down like the teeth of an old horse—in places they are almost worn in two. Better than any guidebook patter of facts and figures—better than the bells and the graves and the hand-made beams—these steps convey to the mind a sense of age.

You stand and look at them, and you see there the tally of vanished generations—the heavy boot of the conquistador; the sandaled foot of the old padre; the high heel of a dainty Spanish-born lady; the bare, horny sole of the Indian convert—each of them taking its tiny toll out of stone and mortar—each of them wearing away its infinitesimal mite—until through years and years the firm stone was scored away and channeled out and left at it is now, with curves in it and deep hollows.

Given a dime's worth of imagination to start on, almost any one could people that spot with the dead-and-gone figures of that shadowy past; could forget the trolley cars curving right up to the walls; the electric lights strung in globular festoons along the ancient ceilings of the porticoes; the roofs of the new, shiny modern bungalows dotting the gentle slopes below—could forget even that the brown-cowled, rope-girthed father who served as guide spoke with a strong German accent; could almost forgive the impious driver of the rig that brought one here for referring to this place as the Mish. But be sure there would be one thing to bring you hurtling back again to earth, no matter how far aloft your fancy soared—and that would be the ever-present souvenir-collecting tourist, to whom no shrine is holy and no memory is sacred.

There is no charge for admission to the Mission. All comers, regardless of breed or creed, are welcomed; and on constant duty is a gentle-voiced priest, ready to lead the way to the inner rooms where priceless relics of the day when the Spaniards first came to California are displayed; and into the church itself, with its candles burning before the high altar and the quaint old holy pictures ranged thick upon the walls; and through the burying-ground—and to all the rest of it; and for this service there is nothing to pay. On departing the visitor, if he chooses, may leave a coin behind; but he doesn't have to—it isn't compulsory.

There is a kind of traveler who repays this hospitality by defiling the walls with his inconsequential name, scratched in or scrawled on, and by toting away as a souvenir whatever portable object he can confiscate when nobody is looking. Up in the bell tower the masonry is all defaced and pocked where these vandals have dug at it with pocketknives; and as we were coming away, one of them—a typical specimen—showed me with deep pride half of a brick pouched in his coat pocket. It seemed that while the priest's back was turned he had pried it loose from the frilled ornamentation of a vault in the burying-ground at the cost only of his self-respect—admitting that he had any of that commodity in stock—and a broken thumbnail. It was, indeed, a priceless treasure and he valued it accordingly. And yet, at a distance of ten feet in an ordinary light, no one not in the secret could have said offhand whether that half-brick came out of a Mission tomb in California or a smokehouse in Arkansas.

We didn't see any Indians when we ran down into Mexico. However, we only ran into Mexico for a distance of a mile and a half below the California state boundary, and maybe that had something to do with it. By automobile we rode from San Diego over to the town of Tia Juana, signifying, in our tongue, Aunt Jane. Ramona, heroine of Helen Hunt Jackson's famous novel, had an aunt called Jane. I guess they had a grudge against the lady; they named this town after her.

Selling souvenirs to tourists, who come daily on sightseeing coaches from Coronado Beach and San Diego, is the principal pastime of the natives of Tia Juana. Weekdays they do this; and sometimes on a Sunday afternoon they have a bullfight in their little bullring. On such an occasion the bullfighting outfit is specially imported from one of the larger towns farther inland. Sometimes the whole troupe comes from Juarez and puts on a regular metropolitan production, with the original all-star cast. There is the gallant performer known as the armadilla, who teases the bull to desperation by waving a red shawl at him; the no less daring parabola, sticking little barbed boleros in the bull's withers; and, last of all, the intrepid mantilla, who calmly meets the final rush of the infuriated beast and, with one unerring thrust of his trusty sword, delivers the porte-cochere, or fatal stroke, just behind the left shoulder-blade, while all about the assembled peons and pianolas rend the ambient air with their delighted cry: "Hoi Polloi! Hoi Polloi! Dolce far niente!"

Isn't it remarkable how readily the seasoned tourist masters the difficulties of a foreign language? Before I had been in Mexico an hour I had picked up the intricate phraseology of the bullfight; and I was glad afterward that I took the trouble to get it all down in my mind correctly, because such knowledge always comes in handy. You can use it with effect in company—it stamps you as a person of culture and travel—and it impresses other people; but then I always could pick up foreign languages easily. I do not wish to boast—but with me it amounts to a positive gift.

It was a weekday when we visited Tia Juana, and so there was no bullfight going on; in fact, there didn't seem to be much of anything going on. Once in a while a Spigotty lady would pass, closely followed by a couple of little Spigots, and occasionally the postmaster would wake up long enough to accept a sheaf of postcards from a tourist and then go right back to sleep again. We had sampled the tamales of the country, finding them only slightly inferior to the same article as sold in Kansas City, Kansas; and we had drifted—three of us—into a Mexican cafe. It was about ten feet square and was hung with chromos furnished by generous Milwaukee brewers and other decorations familiar to all who have ever visited a crossroads bar-room on our own side of the line. Bottled beer appeared to be the one best bet in the drinking line, and the safest one, too; but somehow I hated—over here upon the soil of another country—to be calling for the domestic brews of our own St. Louis! Personally I desired to conform my thirst to the customs of the country—only I didn't know what to ask for. I had learned the bullfighting language, but I hadn't progressed very far beyond that point. While I was deliberating a Mexican came in and said something in Spanish to the barkeeper and the barkeeper got a bottle of a clear, almost colorless fluid out from under the counter and poured him a sherry glassful of it. So then, by means of a gesture that is universal and is understood in all climes, I indicated to the barkeeper that I would take a little of the same.

The moment, though, that I had swallowed it I realized I had been too hasty. It was mescal—an explosive in liquid form that is brewed or stilled or steeped, or something, from the juices of a certain variety of cactus, according to a favorite family prescription used by Old Nick several centuries ago when he was residing in this section. For its size and complexion I know of nothing that is worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with mescal, unless it is the bald-faced hornet of the Sunny South. It goes down easily enough—that is not the trouble—but as soon as it gets down you have the sensation of having swallowed a comet.

As I said before, I didn't see any Indians in Old Mexico, but if I had taken one more swig of the national beverage I am satisfied that not only would I have seen a great number of them, but, with slight encouragement, might have been one myself. For the purpose of assuaging the human thirst I would say that it is a mistake on the part of a novice to drink mescal—he should begin by swallowing a lighted kerosene lamp for practice and work up gradually; but the experience was illuminating as tending to make me understand why the Mexicans are so prone to revolutions. A Mexican takes a drink of mescal before breakfast, on an empty stomach, and then he begins to revolute round regardless.

On leaving Tia Juana we stopped to view the fort, which was the principal attraction of the place. It was located in the outskirts just back of the cluster of adobe houses and frame shacks that made up the town. The fort proper consisted of a mud wall about three feet high, inclosing perhaps half an acre of bare clayey soil. Outside the wall was a moat, upward of a foot deep, and inside was a barrack. This barrack—I avoid using the plural purposely—was a wooden shanty that had been whitewashed once, but had practically recovered from it since; and its walls were pierced—for artillery-fire, no doubt—with two windows, to the frames of which a few fragments of broken glass still adhered. Overhead the flag of the republic was flying; and every half-minute, so it seemed to us, a drum would beat and a bugle would blow and the garrison would turn out, looking—except for their guns—very much like a squad of district-telegraph messengers. They would evolute across the parade ground a bit and then retire to quarters until the next call to arms should sound.

We could not get close enough to ascertain what all the excitement was about, because they would not let us. We were not allowed to venture within fifty yards of the outer breastworks, or kneeworks; and even then, so the village authorities warned us, we must keep moving. A woman camera fiend from Coronado was along, and she unlimbered her favorite instrument with the idea of taking a few snapshots of this martial scene.

As she leveled the lens a yell went up from somewhere, and out of the barrack and over the wall came skipping a little officer, leaving a trail of inflammatory Spanish behind him in a way to remind you of the fireman cleaning out the firebox of the Through Limited. He was not much over five feet tall and his shabby little uniform needed the attention of the dry cleanser, but he carried a sword and two pistols, and wore a brass gorget at his throat, a pair of huge epaulets and a belt; and he had gold braid and brass buttons spangled all over his sleeves and the front of his coat, and a pair of jingling spurs were upon his heels. There was a long feather in his cap, too—and altogether, for his size, he was most impressive to behold. He charged right up to the abashed camera lady and, through an interpreter, explained to her that it was strictly against the rules to permit a citizen of a foreign power to make any pictures of the fortifications whatsoever. He appeared to nurse a horrid fear that the secret of the fortifications might become known above the line, and that some day, armed with this information, the Boy Scouts or a Young Ladies' High School might swoop down and capture the whole works. He explained to the lady, that, much as he regretted it, if she persisted in her suspicious and spylike conduct, he would have to smash her camera for her. So she desisted.

The little officer and his merry men had ample reason for being a mite nervous just then. Their country was in the midst of its spring revolution. The Madero family had just been thinned out pretty extensively, and it was not certain yet whether the Diaz faction or the Huerta faction, or some other faction, would come out on top. Besides, these gallant guardians of the frontier were a long way from headquarters and in no position to figure out in advance which way the national cat would jump next. All they knew was that she was jumping.



Every morning, so we heard, they were taking a vote to decide whether they would be Federalists that day or Liberalists, or what not; and the vote was invested with a good deal of personal interest, too, because there was no telling when a superior force might arrive from the interior; and if they had happened to vote wrong that day there was always the prospect of their being backed up against a wall, with nothing to look at except a firing squad and a row of newmade graves.

We were told that one morning, about three or four weeks before the date of our visit, the garrison had been in the barrack casting their usual ballot. They were strong Huertaists that morning—it was Viva Huerta! all the way. Just about the time the vote was being announced a couple of visiting Americans in an automobile came down the road flanking the fort. There had been a rain and the road was slippery with red mud. As the driver took the turn at the corner his wheels began skidding and he lost control. The car skewed off at a tangent, hurdled the moat, and tore a hole in the mud wall; and, as the occupants spilled sprawlingly through the gap, a front tire exploded with a loud report. The garrison took just one look out the front door, jumped to the conclusion that the Villa crowd had arrived and were shooting automobiles at them, and unanimously adjourned by the back way into the woods. Some of them did not get back until the shades of night had descended upon the troubled land.

Such is military life in our sister republic in times of war, and yet they sometimes have a very realistic imitation of the real thing over there. Revolution before last there were two separate engagements in this little town of Tia Juana. A lot of belligerents were killed and a good many more were wounded.

In an iron letter box in front of the post-office we saw a round hole where a steel-jacketed bullet had passed through after first passing through a prominent citizen. We did not see this citizen. It became necessary to bury him shortly after the occurrence referred to.

In vain I sought the red brother on my saunterings through California. In San Francisco I once thought I had him treed. On Pacific Street, a block ahead of me, I saw a group of pedestrians, wrapped in loose flowing garments of many colors. Even at that distance I could make out that they were dark-skinned and had long black hair. I said to myself: "It is probable that these persons are connected with Doctor Somebody's Medicine Show; but I don't care if they are. They are Indians—more Indians than I have seen in one crowd at one time since Buffalo Bill was at Madison Square Garden last spring. I shall look them over."

So I ran and caught up with them—but they were not Indians. They were genuine Egyptian acrobats, connected with a traveling carnival company. When Moses transmitted the divine command to the Children of Israel that they should spoil the Egyptians, the Children of Israel certainly did a mighty thorough job of it. That was several thousand years ago and those Egyptians I saw were still spoiled. I noticed it as soon as I got close to them.

In Salt Lake City I saw half a dozen Indians, but in a preserved form only. They were on display in a museum devoted to relics of the early days. In my opinion Indians do not make very good preserves, especially when they have been in stock a long time and have become shopworn, as was the case with these goods. Personally, I would not care to invest. Besides, there was no telling how old they were. They had been dug out, mummified, from the cliff-dwellers' ruins in the southern part of the state, along with their household goods, their domestic utensils, their weapons of war and their ornaments; and there they were laid out in glass cases for modern eyes to see. There were plenty of other interesting exhibits in this museum, including several of Brigham Young's suits of clothes. For a man busied with statecraft and military affairs and domestic matters, Brigham Young must have changed clothes pretty often. I couldn't keep from wondering how a man with a family like his was found the time for it.

To my mind the most interesting relic in the whole collection was the spry octogenarian who acted as guide and showed us through the place—for he was one of the few living links between the Old West and the New. As a boy-convert to Mormonism he came across the desert with the second expedition that fled westward from Gentile persecution after Brigham Young had blazed the trail. He was a pony express rider in the days of the overland mail service. He was also an Indian fighter—one of the trophies he showed was a scalp of his own raising practically, he having been present when it was raised by a friendly Indian scout from the head of the hostile who originally owned it—and he had lived in Salt Lake City when it was a collection of log shanties within the walls of a wooden stockade. And now here he was, a man away up in his eighties, but still brisk and bright, piloting tourists about the upper floor of a modern skyscraper.

We visited the museum after we had inspected the Mormon Tabernacle and had looked at the Mormon Temple—from the outside—and had seen the Beehive and the Lion House and the Eagle Gate and the painfully ornate mansion where Brigham Young kept his favorite wife, Amelia. The Tabernacle is famous the world over for its choir, its organ and its acoustics—particularly its acoustics. The guide, who is a Mormon elder detailed for that purpose, escorts you into the balcony, away up under the domed wooden roof; and as you wait there, listening, another elder, standing upon a platform two hundred feet away, drops an ordinary pin upon the floor—and you can distinctly hear it fall. At first you are puzzled to decide exactly what it sounds like; but after a while the correct solution comes to you—it sounds exactly like a pin falling. Next to the Whispering Gallery in the Capitol at Washington, I don't know of a worse place to tell your secrets to a friend than the Mormon Tabernacle. You might as well tell them to a woman and be done with it!

In Salt Lake City I had rather counted upon seeing a Mormon out walking with three or four of his wives—all at one time. I felt that this would be a distinct novelty to a person from New York, where the only show one enjoys along this line is the sight of a chap walking with three or four other men's wives—one at a time. But here, as in my quest for the Indian, I was disappointed some more. Once I thought I was about to score. I was standing in front of the Zion Cooperative Mercantile Establishment, which is a big department store owned by the Church, but having all the latest improvements, including bargain counters and special salesdays. Out of the door came an elderly gentleman attired in much broadcloth and many whiskers, and behind him trailed half a dozen soberly dressed women of assorted ages.

Filled with hope, I fell in behind the procession and followed it across to the hotel. There I learned the disappointing truth. The broadclothed person was not a Mormon at all.

He was a country bank president from somewhere back East and the women of his party were Ohio school-teachers. Anywhere except in Utah I doubt if he could have fooled me, either, for he had the kind of whiskers that go with the banking profession. For some reason whiskers are associated with the practice of banking all over this country; hallowed by custom, they have come to stand for financial responsibility. A New York banker wears those little jib-boom whiskers on the sides of his head and sometimes a pennon on his chin, whereas a country banker usually has a full-rigged face. This man's whiskers were of the old square barkentine cut. I should have known who he was by his sailing gear.

And so, disappointed in my dreams of seeing Indians on the hoof and Mormon households taking the air in family groups, I left Salt Lake City, with its fine wide streets and its handsome business district and its pure air and its background of snow-topped mountains, and started on the long homebound hike. It was late in the afternoon. We had quit Utah, with its flat plains, its garden spots reclaimed from the desert, and its endless succession of trim red-brick farmhouses, which seem to be the universal dwelling-places of the prosperous Mormon farmer.

We had departed from the old trail that Mark Twain crawled over in a stage-coach and afterward wrote about in his immortal Roughing It. The Limited, traveling forty-odd miles an hour, was skipping through the lower part of Wyoming before turning southward into Colorado. We were in the midst of an expanse of desolation and emptiness, fifteen miles from anywhere, and I was sitting on the observation platform of the rear car, watching how the shafts of the setting sun made the colors shift and deepen in the canyons and upon the sides of the tall red mesas, when I became aware that the train was slowing down.

THE END