Chapter VII (9)

At the foot of Shasta our train stood for a bare ten minutes while travelers descended and partook of the vilest tasting waters that nature might boast in all California. Shasta spring water is supposed to be mightily beneficial and that is probably true, for our experience with spring waters has been that their benefits have existed in an inverse ratio to their pleasantness of taste. But if Nature had given her benefactions to Shasta a sort of Spartan touch, she has more than compensated for the severity of her gifts by the beauty of their setting. You literally descend directly upon the springs. The railroad performs earthly miracles to land a passenger in front of them. It descends a vast number of feet in an incredibly short length of track--the conductor will reduce these to cold statistics--and your idea is a quick drop on a gigantic hair-pin. At the base of the lowest leg of this hair-pin is the spring, set in a deep glen, the mossy banks of which are constantly adrip and seemingly one great slow-moving waterfall, even throughout the fearfully dry seasons of California. The whole thing is distinctly European, distinctly different--a bit of Swiss scenery root-dug and brought to the West Coast of the United States.

After Shasta and the springs, another of the desolate, fascinating canyons to be threaded for many miles besides the twistings of a melancholy river, then--of a sudden--open country, farmers growing green things, ranch-houses, dusty county-roads, with automobiles plowing them dustier still, little towns, more ranches--everything in California from two to two million acres is a ranch--then a grinding of air-brakes and your neighbor across the aisle is fumbling with his red-covered time-table to locate the station upon it. As for you, you don't care about what station it really may be. It is a station. You are sure of that. There is the familiar light yellow depot, but in the well-kept lawn that abuts it grows a giant tree. That tree is a palm, and the palm-tree typifies California to every tingling sense of your mentality.

This is the real California. The mountains have already become accustomed things to you, the broad ranches were coming into their own before you ever reached Denver, but the palm is exotic in your homeland, a glass-protected thing. That it grows freely beside this little unidentified railroad station proclaims to you that you are at last in a land that bids defiance to that trinity of scourging giants--December, January and February--and calls itself summer the whole year round.

This palm has brought you to a sense of your location--to California. The romance that has been spelled into you of a distant land, and of the men who toiled that it become a great state peopled with great cities, of Nature's lavish gifts and terrific blows laid alike upon it, came into your heart and soul and body at the first glimpse of that tree. Before the train is under way again your camera has been called into action--mental processes are supplemented by a permanent record chemically etched upon a film of celluloid.

After that pioneer among palm-trees, more of these little yellow depots and more of these rarely beautiful palms standing beside them. The ranches multiply, this valley of Sacramento is a rarely fertile thing. Growth stretches for miles, without ever a hint of undulation. California is the flattest thing you have ever seen. And again and again you will be declaring it the most mountainous of all our states. The flat-lands carry you beyond daylight into dusk. The towns multiply, a glow of arc reflection against the shadows of evening is Sacramento a dozen miles distant. Then there is a rattle of switches, a halt at a junction station, and mail is being gathered from the impromptu literature makers on our train to go east. The main line is reached. And a little later the Straits of Costa are crossed. Here is a broad arm of the sea and if it were still lingering daylight you might declare that Holland, not Switzerland, had been transplanted into California. The sea laughs at bridges, and so from Benecia to Port Costa we go on a great ferryboat, eleven Pullmans, a great ten-drivered passenger locomotive--all of us together. For twenty minutes we slip across the water, breathing fresh air once again and standing in the ferry's bow looking toward the shadowy outline of a high, black hill carelessly punctuated here and there by yellow points of light. A new land is always mysterious and fascinating; by night doubly mysterious, doubly fascinating.

The ferry boat fast to its bridge, the locomotive is no longer an impotent thing. We are making the last stage of a long trip across the continent by rail. The little towns are multiplying. The subtle prescience of a great city is upon us. We turn west, then south and the suburban villages are shouldering one another all the more closely the entire way. We skirt and barely miss Berkeley, hesitate at Oakland and then come to a grinding final stop at the end of a pier that juts itself far out beyond the shallow reaches of San Francisco bay. Again there is a ferry boat--a capacious craft not unlike those craft upon which we have ridden time and time again between Staten island and the tip of Manhattan--and when its screws have ceased to turn we will finally be in the real San Francisco, reached as a really great metropolis may be reached, after an infinitude of time and trouble. It is still October--the warmest month of the year in the city by the Golden Gate--and the girls and their young men fill the long benches on the open decks of the ferry. The wind blows soft from the Pacific, and straight ahead is San Francisco--a mystery of yellow illumination rising from the water's edge.

As the ferry makes her course, the goal is less and less of a mystery. Street lights begin to give some sort of half-coherent form to the high hills that make the amphitheater site of San Francisco, they dip in even lines to show the course of straight avenues. A great beer sign changes and rechanges in spelling its lively message, there is a moon-faced clock held aloft, you pinch your memory sharply, and then know that it must be the tower of the great ferry-house, the conspicuous waterfront land-mark of San Francisco.

In another five minutes you are passing under that tower--a veritable gate-keeper of the city--and facing up Market street; from the beginning its undisputed chief thoroughfare. A taxicab is standing there. You throw your hand-baggage into it, come tumbling after, yourself. There is a confusion of street-lights, a momentary intimacy of a trolley car running alongside--a little later the glare and confusion of a hotel lobby, the fascinating fuss of getting yourself settled in a strange town. There is a double witchery in approaching a great new city at night.

In the morning to tumble out of your hotel into that same strange town in the clarity of early sunshine, to have this great street or that or that--Market or Geary or Powell--stretching forth as if longing to invite your explorations--here again is the fascination of travel. The big trolley cars come rolling up Market street in quick succession, and for an instant their appeal is strong. But over there is a car of another sort, running on narrow-gauge tracks and with the roar of an endless cable ever at work beneath the pavement. The little cars upon those narrow tracks interest you. They are as gaily colored and as bravely striped as any circus wagon of boyhood days, and when you pay your fare you can take your choice--between the interior of a stuffy little cabin amidships or open seats at either end arranged after the time-honored fashion of Irish jaunting cars. San Franciscans do not hesitate. They range themselves along the open seats of the dinky cars and look proud as toads as the cars go clanking up the awful hills.

The San Francisco cable car is in a transportation class by itself. It clings tenaciously to early traditions. For in San Francisco the cable railroad was born--and in San Francisco the cable railroad still remains. One Andrew S. Halladie was its inventor--somewhere early in the "seventies." Up Clay street hill, and to know and appreciate the slope of Clay street hill one must have seen it once at least, Halladie's first car struggled, while its passengers held their breaths just as first-comers to San Francisco still hold their breaths as they ride up and down the fearful hills. The telegraph told to the whole land how a street railroad was running on a rope out in that little-known land of marvels--California. But the telegraph could not tell what the railroad on a rope meant to San Francisco--San Francisco encompassed and held in by her high sand hills. The Clay street cable road had conquered one of the meanest of these hills and they began to plan other roads of a similar sort. Like a blossoming and growing vine the city spread, almost overnight. Sand-dunes became building-lots of high value and a new bonanza era was come to San Francisco. And, with the traditional generosity of the coast, she gave her transportation idea to other cities. In a little while St. Louis, Chicago, Washington and New York were banishing the horse cars from their busiest streets. A new era in city transit was begun.

A few years later the broomstick trolley--cheaper and in many respects far more efficient--displaced the cable-cars in many of these cities. But San Francisco up to the present time has stuck loyally to her old-time hill conquerors. And the nervous lever-clutch of the gripman as he "gets the rope" is as distinctive of her as are the fantasies of her marvelous wooden architecture.

Some of the cable cars have disappeared--they began to go in those wonderful years of reconstruction right after the fire, and they are already obsolete in the city's chief thoroughfare, Market street. The others remain. Over on Pacific avenue is a little line that the San Franciscans dearly love, for it is particularly reminiscent of the trams that used to clatter through Market street before the fire--a diminutive summer-house in front and pulling an immaculate little horseless horse car behind. Eventually all will go. One road's franchise has already expired and upon it San Francisco is today maintaining the first municipally operated street car line in any metropolitan city of America. If the experiment in Geary street succeeds, and it is being carefully operated with such a hope clearly in view, it will probably be extended to the cable lines when their franchises expire and they revert automatically to the city.

* * * * *

The distinctive mannerisms of San Francisco are changing--slowly but very surely indeed. Some of them still remain, however, in greater or less force. At the restaurants, in the shops and in the hotels you receive your change in "hard money"--gold and silver coin. Your real San Franciscan will have nothing else. There is something about the substantial feeling of a coin, something about the tinkling of a handful of it that runs straight to the bottom of his heart. Since the fire--which worked ever more fearful havoc with San Francisco comforts than with the physical structure of the city--the use of paper money has increased. But your true Californian will have none of it. When he goes east and they give him paper money he fusses and fumes about it--inwardly at least. He thinks that it may slip out of that pesky inner pocket or vest or coat. He wants gold--a handful of it in his trousers-pocket to jingle and to stay put. And as for pennies. You who count yourself of the East will have to come east once again before you pocket such copper trash--they will have none of them upon the West Coast. Small change may be anything else but it is not Western.

"Western," did we say?

Hold on. San Francisco is not western. California is not western. To call either western is to commit an abomination approaching the use of the word "Frisco."

"California is to all purposes, practical and social--a great island," your San Franciscan will explain to you. "To the east of us lies another dividing sea--the broad miles of desert and of mountains, and so broad is it that Hong Kong or Manila or Yokohama seem nearer to us than Chicago or St. Louis. We recognize nothing west of New York and Washington. Between is that vast space--the real West--which fast trains and good, bridge in a little more than four days. In there is your West--Illinois, Mississippi, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado--all the rest of that fine family of American states.

"In Los Angeles, now, it is different. The lady that you take out upon your arm there is probably from Davenport or Kokomo or Indianapolis, whether she will admit it or not. Los Angeles is western. We are not. We are 'the Coast' and be exceeding careful, young man, how you say it."

He has spoken the truth. Your typical San Franciscan is quite as well versed in the streets and shops and hotels of London, Paris and Vienna, as your typical New Yorker or Bostonian. The four days bridging across the North American continent is no more to him than the Hudson river ferries to the commuter from New Jersey. His city is cosmopolitan--and he is proud of it. Her streets are cosmopolitan and so are her shops and her great hotels. To the stately Palace reared from the site of the old, and with a new glass-covered court rivaling the glories of its predecessor, still come princes and diplomats, globe-trotters of every sort and bearing in their train wondrous luggage of every sort, prosperous miners from the North, bankers from the East, Californians from every corner of their great state, and look with curious interest at the elect of San Francisco sipping their high tea there in the court yard.

And the cosmopolitanism of the streets is still more marked. Portuguese, Italian, sour-doughs from Alaska, hundreds of the little brown Japs who are giving California such a tremendous worry these days, Indians, French Kanakas, Mexicans, Chinese--the list might be run almost interminably. Of these none are more interesting than the Chinese. You see them in all the downtown quarters of San Francisco--the men with that inscrutable gravity and sagacity that long centuries of civilization seem to have given them, the women and the little girls, of high caste or low, invariably hatless and wearing loose coat and trousers--in many cases of brilliant colors and rare Oriental silks. And when you come to their own city within a city--San Francisco's famous Chinatown--they are the dominant folk upon the street. Of course the new Chinatown is not the old--with its subterranean labyrinths of unspeakable vileness and dirt, with danger and crime lurking in each of its dark corners. That passed completely in the fire. But it had begun to pass even before that great calamity. It was being exploited. Paid guides, with a keen sense of the theatrical, were beginning to work the damage. The "rubberneck wagons" were multiplying.

Today Chinatown is frankly commercial. It is clean and new and clever. Architects have brought more of the Chinese spirit into its buildings than the old ever had. It does not lack color--by day, the treasures of its shops, the queer folk who walk its streets, even the bright red placards upon the door-lintels; by night the close slow-moving throngs through Grant avenue--its chief thoroughfare--the swinging lanterns above their heads, the radiance that comes out from brilliantly lighted and mysterious rooms along the way--the new Chinatown of San Francisco. But it is now frankly commercial. The paid guides and the "rubberneck wagons" have completed the ruin. If you are taken into an opium den, you may be fairly sure that the entire performance has been staged for the delectation of you and yours. For the real secrets even of the new Chinatown are not shown to the unappreciative eyes of white folk.

At the edge of Chinatown slopes Portsmouth square and here the cosmopolitanism of San Francisco reaches its high apex. Around it chatters the babel of all tongues, beyond it stretches the "Barbary Coast,"[G] that collection of vile, if picturesque resorts that possesses a tremendous fascination for some San Franciscans and some tourists but which has no place within the covers of this book. To Portsmouth square come the representatives of all these little colonies of babbling foreigners, the men who sail the seven seas--the flotsam and the jetsam not alone of the Orient but of the whole wide world as well. There is a little man who sits on one side of the square and who for a very small sum will execute cubist art upon your cuticle. Among tattooers he acknowledges but two superiors--a one-legged veteran who plies his trade near the wharves of the Mersey, and a Hindu artist at Calcutta. The little shops that line Portsmouth square are the little shops of many peoples. Over their counters you can buy many things practical, and many, many more of the most impractical things in all the world. And the new Hall of Justice rises above the square in the precise site of the old.

[G] As this goes to press a "vice crusade" has swept San
Francisco and the "Barbary Coast" has been forced to close
its doors. It is not unlikely that they may be opened once
again. E. H.

Portsmouth square has played its part in the history of San Francisco. From it the modern city dates. It was the plaza of the old Spanish town, and within this plaza Commodore Montgomery of the American sloop-of-war _Portsmouth_ first raised the Stars and Stripes--in the strenuous days of the Mexican war. After that the stirring days of gold-times with the vigilantes conducting hangings on the flat roofs of the neighboring houses of adobe. Portsmouth square indeed has played its part in the history of San Francisco.

"Portsmouth square," you begin to say, "Portsmouth square--was it not Portsmouth square that Stevenson--"

Precisely so. There are still some of the shop-keepers about that ancient plaza who can recall the thin figure of the poet and dreamer who loafed lazy days in that open space--hobnobbing with sailors and the strange dark-skinned vagabond folk from overseas. There is a single monument in the square today--a smooth monolith upon whose top there rests a ship, its sails full-bellied to the wind but which never reaches a port. Upon the smooth surface of that stone you may read:

TO REMEMBER
ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON

To be honest To be
kind--To earn a lit-
tle To spend a lit-
tle less--to make
upon the whole a
family happier for
his presence--To re-
nounce when that shall
be necessary and not
be embittered--To
keep a few friends but
these without capitula-
tion--Above all on
the same grim condition
to keep friends
with himself--Here is
a task for all that a
man has of fortitude
and delicacy

That is the lesson that Portsmouth square gives to the wanderers who drag themselves today to its benches--the words that come as a sermon from one who knew and who pitied wrecked humanity.

There are other great squares of San Francisco--and filled with interest--perhaps none other more so than Union square, in the heart of the fine retail section with its theaters and hotels and clubs. Of these last there is none more famous than the Bohemian. More showy clubs has San Francisco. The Pacific Union in its great brown-stone house upon the very crest of Nob Hill, where in other days the bonanza millionaires were wont to build their high houses so that they might look across the housetops and see the highways in from the sea, has a home unsurpassed by any other in the whole land. But the Bohemian does not get its fame from its fine town club-house. Its "jinks" held in August in a great cluster of giant redwood trees off in the wonderful California hills are world-renowned. In the old days all that was necessary for a man to be a Bohemian, beyond the prime requisite of being a good fellow, was that he be able to sing a song, to tell a story or to write a verse. In these days the Bohemian Club, like many other institutions that were simple in the beginning, has waxed prosperous. Some of its members have rather elaborate cottages in among the redwoods and go back and forth in automobiles. But much of the old spirit remains. It is the spirit which the San Franciscan tells you gave first American recognition to such an artist as Luisa Tetrazzini, which many years ago gave such a welcome to the then famous Lotta that the generous actress in a burst of generous enthusiasm returned with the gift to the city of the Lotta fountain--at one of the most famous of the Market street corners. It is the spirit which makes San Francisco give to art or literature the quickest appreciation of any city in America. It is, in fact, the same spirit that gives to San Francisco the reputation of having the gayest night life of any city in the world--with the possible exception of Paris.

Night life in a city means the intoxication of many lights, the creature comfort of good restaurants. San Francisco does not lack either. When the last glimmer of day has disappeared out over the Golden Gate, Market street, Powell street, all the highways and the byways that lead into them are ablaze with the incandescent glories of electricity. Commerce and the city's lighting boards vie with one another in the splendor of their offerings.

And as for the restaurants--San Francisco boasts of twelve hundred hotels, alone. Each hotel has presumably at least one restaurant. And some of the finest of the eating-places of the city at the Golden Gate are solely restaurants. As a matter of real fact, San Francisco is the greatest restaurant city on the continent--in proportion to her population even greater than New York. In New York and more recently in Chicago the so-called "kitchenette apartment" has come into great vogue among tiny folks--two or three rooms, a bath and a very slightly enlarged clothes-press in which a small gas or electric stove, a sink and a refrigerator suffices for the preparation of light breakfasts and lunches. Dinners are taken out. In San Francisco the "kitchenettes" are omitted in thousands of apartments. All the meals are eaten in public dining-rooms and the restaurants thrive wonderfully. The soft climate does much to make this possible.

Living in these new apartments of San Francisco is a comparatively simple matter. Your capital investment for house-keeping may be small. A few chairs, a table or two, some linen--you are ready to begin.

Beds?

Bless your soul, the builder of the apartment house solved that problem for you. Your bed is a masterpiece of architecture which lets down from the wall, _à la Pullman_. By day it goes up against the wall again and an ingenious arrangement of wall-shutters enables the bedding to air throughout the entire day. In some cases the beds will let down either within, or without, to a sleeping-porch, for your real San Franciscan has a healthy sort of an animal love for living and sleeping in the open. The glories of the open California country that lie within an hour or two of the city tempt him into it each month of the year, and he is impeccable in his horseback riding, his fishing and his shooting.

To return to the restaurants--a decided contrast to that rough life in the open which he really loves--here is one, quite typical of the city. It is gay, almost garish with color and with light. Its cabaret almost amounts to an operatic performance and its proprietor will tell you with no little pride that he was presenting this form of restaurant entertainment long months before the idea ever reached New York. He will also tell you that he changes the entire scheme of decoration each three months--the San Franciscan mind is as volatile as it is appreciative.

Little Jap girls pass through the crowded tables bringing you hot tea biscuits of a most delicious sort. Other girls, this time in Neapolitan dress, are distributing flowers. The head-waiter bends over you and suggests the salad with which you start your dinner, for it seems to be the fashion in San Francisco restaurants to eat your salad before your soup. The restaurant is a gay place, crowded. Late-comers must find their way elsewhere. And the food is surprisingly good.

But we best remember a little restaurant just back of the California market in Pine street--into which we stumbled of a Saturday night just about dinner-time. It was an unpretentious place, with two musicians fiddling for dear life in a tiny balcony. But the _table d'hôte_--price one dollar, with a bottle of California wine after the fashion of all San Francisco _table d'hôtes_--was perfection, the special dishes which the waiter suggested even finer. _Soupe l'oignon_ that might linger in the mind for a long time, a marvelous combination salad, chicken _bonne femme_--which translated meant a chicken pulled apart, then cooked with artichokes in a _casserole_, the whole smothered with a wonderful brown gravy--there was a dinner, absolute in its simplicity yet leaving nothing whatsoever to be wished. And a long time later we read that Maurice Baring, author and globe-trotter, had visited the place and pronounced its cookery the finest that he had ever tasted.

There are dozens of such little places in San Francisco--named after the fashion of its shops in grotesque or poetic fashion--and they are almost all of them good. There is little excuse for anything else in a town whose very cosmopolitanism proclaims real cooks in the making, whose wharves are rubbed by smack and schooner bringing in the food treasures of the sea, whose farms are vast truck gardens for the land, whose markets run riot in the richest of edibles. Your San Franciscan is nothing if not an epicure. It is hardly fair, however, to assume that he is a glutton or that he merely lives to eat. For he is, in reality, so very much more--optimistic, generous, brave--and how he does delight to experiment. California is still in the throes of what seems to be a social and political earthquake, with each shake growing a little more rough than its predecessor. She has just overturned most of her political ideals for the first fifty years of her life. She delights in politics. She really lives. San Francisco, standing between those two great schools of thought, the University of California at Berkeley, and Leland Stanford University at Palo Alto, prides herself upon her growing intellectuality. From the folk who dally with advanced thought of every sort down to those who are merely puzzled and dissatisfied, the population of this Californian metropolis demands a new order of things. That as much as anything else explains the recent political revolutions. Since the great fire, the plans for those revolutions have been under progress.

The mention of that fire--if you make any pretense to diplomacy you must never call it an earthquake around the Golden Gate--brings us back to the San Francisco of today. You look up and down Market street for traces of that fire--and in vain. The city looks modern, after the fashion of cities of the American west, but its buildings do not seem to have arisen simultaneously after the scourge that leveled them--simultaneously. But turn off from Market street, to the south through Second or Third streets or north through any of the parallel throughfares that lead out of that same main-stem of San Francisco.

Now the fullness of that disaster--which was not more to you at the time than the brilliancy of newspaper dispatches--comes home to you for the first time. In the rear of your hotel is an open square of melancholy ruins, below it a corner plat still waste, others beyond in rapid succession. On the side streets, fragments of "party-walls," a bit of crumbling arch, a stout standing chimney remind you of the San Francisco that was and that can never be again. When you go out Market street, you may see where stood the pretentious City Hall--today a stretch of foundation-leveled ruins with a single surviving dome still devoted to the business of the Hall of Records. Still, to get the fullness of the disaster you must make your way into San Francisco's wonderful Golden Gate Park, past the single standing marble doorway of the old Towne house--a pathetic reminder of one of the great houses of the old San Francisco--and straight up to the crest of the high lifted Strawberry Hill. On that hill there stood until the eighteenth of April, 1906, a solid two-storied stone observatory. It seemed to be placed there for all time, but today it vaguely suggests the Coliseum of Rome--a half circle of its double row of arches still standing but the weird ruin bringing back the most tragic five minutes that an American city has ever spent. Or if you will go a little farther, an hour on a quick-moving suburban train will bring you to Palo Alto and the remains of Leland Stanford University, that remarkable institution whose museum formerly held whole cases of Mrs. Stanford's gowns and a _papier-mache_ reproduction of a breakfast once eaten by a member of her family.

It must be discouraging to try to bring order out of the chaos that was wreaked there. The great library, which was wrecked within a month of its completion, and the gymnasium have never been rebuilt, although the dome of the latter is still held aloft on stout steel supports. The chapel, which was Mrs. Stanford's great pride and for which she made so many sacrifices still rears its crossing. Nave and transepts, to say nothing of the marvelous mosaics, were leveled in the twinkling of that April dawn. The long vistas of arched pergolas, the triumph of the master, Richardson, still remain. And the ruin done in that catastrophe to the high-sprung arch he placed over the main entrance to the quadrangle has been in part eradicated.

For Leland Stanford University today represents one of the bravest attempts ever made in this land to repair an all but irreparable loss. It has never lost either faith and hope, and so the visitor to its campus today will see the beginnings toward a complete replacement of the buildings of what was one of the "show universities" of the land. With a patience that must have been infinite, the stones of the old chapel have been sorted out of the ruin--even fragments of the intricate mosaics have been carefully saved--numbered and placed in sequence for re-erection. Already the steel frame of nave and transepts is up again and the tedious work of erecting the masonry walls upon it begun. Leland Stanford has, quite naturally, caught the spirit of San Francisco--the city that would not be defeated.

To analyze that spirit in a sweeping paragraph is all but impossible. Incident upon incident will show it in all its phases. For instance, there was in San Francisco on the morning of the earthquake a sober-minded German citizen who had put his all into a new business--a business that had just begun to prove the wisdom of his investment. When Nature awoke from her long sleep and stretching began to rock the city by the Golden Gate the German rushed upstairs to where his wife and daughter slept. He found them in one another's arms and frantic with terror.

"Papa! Papa!" they shrieked. "We are going to die. It is the end of the world--the business is gone. We are going to die!"

He smiled quietly at them.

"Well, what of it?" he asked quietly. "We die together--and in San Francisco."

A keen-witted business man once boasted that he could capitalize sentiment, express the spirit of the human soul in mere dollars and cents. What price could he give for a love and loyalty of that sort? That was, and still is, the affection that every San Franciscan from the ferry-house back to the farthest crest of the uppermost hill gives to his city--it is the thing that makes her one of the few American towns that possess distinctive personality.

A young matron told us of her own experience on the morning of the fire.

"Of course it was exciting," she said, "with the smoke rolling up upon us from downtown, and the rumors repeating themselves that the disaster was world-wide, that Chicago was in ruins and New York swallowed by a tidal wave, but there was nothing unreal about a single bit of it. I bundled my children together and hurried toward the Presidio--my knowledge of army men assured me that there could be no danger there. I took the little tent handed me and set up my crude house-keeping in it. It still seemed very real and not so very difficult.

"But when those odd little newspapers--that had been printed over in Oakland--came, and I saw the first of their head-lines 'San Francisco in Ruins' then it came upon me that our city, my city, was no more, and it was all over. It was all the most unreal thing in the world and I cried all that night, not for a single loss beyond that of the San Francisco that I had loved. But the next morning they told me how they had telegraphed East for all the architects in sight, and that morning I began planning a new house just as if it had been a pet idea for months and months and months...."

* * * * *

Out of such men and women a great city is ever builded. San Francisco may be wild and harum-scarum, and a great deal of its wildness is painfully exaggerated, but it is a mighty power in itself. Your San Franciscan is rightly proud of the progress made since the great disaster. More than $375,000,000--a sum approximating the cost of the Panama canal--has already been spent in rebuilding the city, and now, like a man who has spent his last dollar on a final substantial meal, the western metropolis calls for cake and scrapes up an additional $18,000,000 for a World's Fair "to beat everything that has gone before." That takes financing--of a high order. It takes something more. It has taken a real spirit--enthusiasm and love and courage--to build a new San Francisco that shall gradually obliterate the poignant memories of the city that was.

20

BELFAST IN AMERICA

Concerning Toronto it may be said that she combines in a somewhat unusual fashion British conservatism and American enterprise. Her neat streets are lined with solid and substantial buildings such as delight the heart of the true Briton wherever he may find them; and yet she has among these "the tallest skyscraper of the British Empire," although the sixteen stories of its altitude would be laughed to scorn by many a second-class American city.

Still, many a first-class American city could hardly afford to laugh at the growth of Toronto, particularly in recent years. She prides herself that she had doubled her population each fifteen years of her history and here is a geometrical problem of growth that becomes vastly more difficult with each oncoming twelvemonth. At the close of the second war of the United States with England, just a century ago, Toronto was a mere hamlet. Beyond it was an unknown wilderness. The town was known as York in those days, and although Governor Simcoe had already chosen the place to be the capital of Upper Canada, it was a struggling little place. Still, it must have struggled manfully, for in 1817 it was granted self-government and in 1834, having garnered in some nine thousand permanent residents, it was vested with a Mayor and the other appurtenances of a real city. Since then it has grown apace, until today in population and in financial resource it is very close upon the heels of Montreal, for so many years the undisputed metropolis of the Dominion.

But perhaps the spur that has advanced Toronto has been the knowledge that west of her is Winnipeg, and that Winnipeg has been doubling her population each decade. And west of Winnipeg is Calgary, west of Calgary, Vancouver; all growing apace until it is a rash man who today can prophesy which will be the largest city of the Dominion of Canada, a dozen years hence. The Canadian cities have certainly been growing in the American fashion--to use that word in its broadest sense.

And yet the strangest fact of all is that Toronto grows--not more American, but more British year by year. Within the past twelve or thirteen years this has become most marked. She has grown from a Canadian town, with many marked American characteristics, into a town markedly English in many, many ways. Now consider for a moment the whys and the wherefores of this.

We have already told of the rapid progress of Toronto, now what of the folk who came to make it? In the beginning there were the Loyalists--"Tories" we call them in our histories; "United Empire Loyalists," as their Canadian descendants prefer to know them--who fled from the Colonies at the time of the Revolution and who found it quite impossible to return. In this way some of the old English names of Virginia have been perpetuated in Toronto, and you may find in one of the older residential sections, a great house known as Beverly, whose doors, whose windows, whose fireplaces, whose every detail are exact replicas of the Beverly House in Virginia which said good-by to its proprietors a century and a half ago.

Those Loyalists laid the foundations of Toronto of today. The municipality of Toronto of today is, as you shall see, most progressive in the very fibers of its being, ranking with such cities as Des Moines and Cleveland and Boston as among the best governed upon the North American continent. Such civic progress was not drawn from the cities of England or of Scotland or of Ireland. And Toronto was a well organized and governed municipality, while Glasgow and Manchester were hardly yet emerging from an almost feudal servility. Because in Toronto the old New England town-meeting idea worked to its logical triumph. The Loyalists who had left their great houses of Salem and of Boston brought more to the wildernesses of Upper Canada than merely fine clothes or family plate.

To this social foundation of the town came, as stock for her growth through the remaining three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the folk of the north of Ireland. The southern counties of the Emerald Island gave to America and gave generously--to New York and to Boston; to New Brunswick and to Lower Canada. The men from the north of Ireland went to Toronto and the nearby cities of what is now the Province of Ontario. And when Toronto became a real city they began to call her the Belfast of America. For such she was. She was a very citadel of Protestantism. Her folk transplanted, found that they would worship God in their austere churches without having the reproachful phrase of "dissenter" constantly whipped in their faces. Toronto meant toleration. So came the Ulster men to their new Belfast. For more than sixty years they came--a great migrating army. And if you would know the way they took root give heed to a single illustration.

One of these Irishmen had founded a retail store in the growing little city of Toronto. It thrived--tremendously. News of its success went back to the little north-of-Ireland village from whence its owner came.

"Timothy Eaton's doin' well in America," was the word that passed through his old county. Timothy Eaton and those who came after him took good care of their kith and kin. For the Eaton business did prosper. Today the firm has two great stores--one in Toronto and one in Winnipeg--and they are not only among the largest in North America but among the largest in the world.

This is but one instance of the way that Toronto has grown. And when, after sixty years of steady immigration there was little of kith and kin left to come from Ireland, there began a migration from the other side of the Irish channel, a new chapter in the growth of Toronto was opened.

No one seems to know just how the tide of English emigration started, but it is a fact that it had its beginning about the time of the end of the Boer war. It is no less a fact that within ten or fifteen years it has attained proportions comparable with the sixty years of Irish immigration. The agents of the Canadian government and of her railroads have shown that it pays to advertise.

There is good reason for this immigration--of course. Canada, with no little wisdom, has given great preference to the English as settlers. She has not wished to change her religions, her language or her customs. The English, in turn, have responded royally to the invitation to come to her broad acres and her great cities. The steamship piers, at Quebec and Montreal in the summer and at Halifax and St. Johns in the winter, are steadily thronged with the newcomers, and they do not speak the strange tongues that one hears at Ellis island in the city of New York. They bring no strange customs or strange religions to the growing young nation that prides herself upon her ability to combine conservatism and progress.

And just as Toronto once did her part in depopulating the north of Ireland, so today is the Province of Ontario and the country to the west of it draining old England. It is related that one little English village--Dove Holes is its name and it is situate in Derbyshire--has been sadly depleted in just this fashion. Eight years ago and it boasted a population of 1250 persons. Today 500 of that number are in America--a new village of their own right in the city of Toronto, if you please--and Dove Holes awaits another Goldsmith to sing of its saddened charms. One resident came, the others followed in his trail to a land that spelled both opportunity and elbow-room. Your real Englishman of so-called middle class, even gentlemen of the profession or service in His Majesty's arms, seem to have one consuming passion. It is to cross Canada and live and die in the little West Coast city of Victoria. Victoria stands on Vancouver island and they have begun to call Vancouver island, "Little England." In its warm, moist climate, almost in its very conformation, it is a replica of the motherland of an Englishman's ideal; a motherland with everything annoying, from hooliganism to suffragettes, removed.

But Victoria is across a broad continent as well as a broad sea, and so your thrifty emigrant from an English town picks Toronto as the city of his adoption. Winnipeg he deems too American; Montreal, with her damnable French blood showing even in the street-signs and the car-placards, quite out of the question. But Toronto does appeal to him and so he comes straight to her. There are whole sections of the town that are beginning to look as if they might have been stolen from Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool--even London itself. The little red-brick houses with their neat, small windows are as distinctively British as the capped and aproned house-maids upon the street. In the States it takes a mighty battle to make a maid wear uniform upon the street. In Toronto it is not even a question for argument. The negro servant, so common to all of us, is unknown. The service of the better grade of Toronto houses is today carefully fashioned upon the British model--even to meal hours and the time-honored English dishes upon the table. And in less aristocratic streets of the town one may see a distinctively British institution, taken root and apparently come to stay. It is known as a "fish and chip shop" and it retails fried fish and potato chips, already cooked and greasy enough to be endearing to the cockney heart.

* * * * *

Remember also that the city upon the north shore of Lake Ontario is an industrial center of great importance. You cannot measure the tonnage of Toronto harbor as you measured the harbor of Cleveland--alongside of the greatest ports of the world--for Ontario is the lonely sister of the five Lakes. No busy commercial fleet treks up and down her lanes. But Toronto is a railroad center of increasing importance; they are still multiplying the lines out from her terminals and, as we have just intimated, she is a great and growing manufacturing community. Her industrial enterprises have been hungry for skilled and intelligent men. They have gradually drafted their ranks from the less-paid trades of the town. Into these places have come the men from the English towns. The street cars are manned by men of delightful cockney accent, they drive the broad flat "lourries," as an Englishman likes to call a dray, they fit well into every work that requires brawn and endurance rather than a high degree of intellectual effort.

Just how this invasion will affect the Toronto of tomorrow no one seems willing to prophesy. The men from Glasgow and from Manchester are used to municipal street railroads and such schemes and the New England town-meeting ideas, which were the products of Anglo-Saxon spirit, come home to rest in English hearts. The street railroad system of Toronto may groan under its burden--it is paying over a million dollars this year to the city and is constantly threatened with extinction as a private corporation. But the Englishman of that city merely grunts at the bargains it offers--six tickets for a quarter; eight in rush-hours, ten for school children and seven for Sabbath riding, all at the same price--and wonders "why the nawsty trams canna' do better by a codger that's workin' like a navvie all the day?"

Toronto will see that they do better--that is her vision into the future. But just how the new blood is to infuse into some of the Puritan ideas of the town--there is another question. Here is a single one of the new puzzling points--the temperance problem. It was not so very long ago that Canada's chief claim for fame rested in the excellence of her whiskey--and that despite the fact that the Canadian climate is ill-adapted to whiskey drinking. The twelfth of July--which you will probably recall as the anniversary of the battle of the Boyne--used to be marked by famous fights, which invariably had marine foundations in Canadian rye. However, during the past quarter of a century, the temperance movement has waxed strong throughout Ontario. Many cities have become "dry" and it is possible that Toronto herself might have been without saloons today--if it had not been for the English invasion. For your Englishman regards his beer as food--"skittles and beer" is something more than merely proverbial--and he must have it. He looks complacently upon the stern Sabbath in Toronto--Sunday in an English city is rarely a hilarious occasion--but he must have his beer. Up to the present time he has had it.

But these problems are slight compared with the problem of assimilation of alien tongues and races, such as has come to New York within the past two decades. The Englishman is but a cousin to the Canadian after all, and he shows that by the enthusiasm with which he enters into her politics. He entered into Mr. Taft's pet reciprocity plan with an enthusiasm of a distinct sort. With all of his anti-American and pro-British ideas he leaped upon it. And when he had accomplished his own part in throttling that idea he exulted. Whether he will exult as much a dozen years hence over the defeat of reciprocity is an open question. But the part that the transplanted Englishman in Canada played in that defeat is unquestioned, just as the part he is playing in providing her with useless Dreadnoughts for the defense of other lands is undisputed.[H] The Englishman is no small factor in Canadian politics; he is a very great factor in the political situation in the city of Toronto.

[H] This plan is temporarily blocked in Canada, whose
enthusiasm for Dreadnoughts seems to be waning. E. H.

Lest you should be bored by the politics of another land, turn your attention to the way the Toronto people live. They have formal entertainments a-plenty--dinners, balls, receptions--a great new castle is being built on the edge of Rosedale for a gubernatorial residence and presumably for the formal housing of royalty which often comes down from Ottawa. There are theaters and good restaurants, and no matter what you may say about her winters, the Canadian summers are delightful. For those who must go, there are the Muskoka Lakes within easy reach, Georgian bay and the untrod wildernesses beyond. But if we lived in Toronto, we think we should stay at home and enjoy that wonderful lake. There are yacht-clubs a-plenty alongside it, bathing beaches, sailing, canoeing--the opportunity for variety of sport is wide. In the milder seasons of the year there is golf and baseball, football, or even cricket, and in the wintertime tobogganing and snowshoeing and iceboating. No wonder that the cheeks of the Toronto girls are pink with good health.

In the autumn there is the big fair--officially the Canadian National Exhibition--which has grown from a very modest beginning into a real institution. Last year nearly a million persons entered its gates, there were more than a hundred thousand admissions upon a single very big day. Delegations of folk came from as far distant as Australia--there were special excursion rates from all but three of the United States. It is not only a big fair but a great fair, still growing larger with each annual exhibition. Toronto folk are immensely proud of it and give to it loyalty and support. And the Canadian government is not above gaining a political opportunity from it. We remember one autumn at Toronto three or four years ago seeing a great electric sign poised upon one of the main buildings. It was a moving sign and the genius of the electrician had made the semblance of a waving British banner. Underneath in fixed and glowing letters you might read:

ONE FLAG, ONE KING, ONE NATION

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To see Toronto as a British city, however, you must go to her in May--at the time of her spring races. The fair is very much like any of the great fairs in the United States. The race-meet is distinctly different. In the United States horse-racing has fallen into ill-repute, and most of the famous tracks around our larger cities have been cut up into building lots. The sport with us was commercialized, ruined, and then practically forbidden. In Canada they have been wiser, although the tendency to make the sport entirely professional and so not sport at all has begun to show itself even over there. But in Toronto they go to horse-races for the love of horse-racing, and not in the hopes of making a living without working for it.

The great spring race-meet is the gallop for the King's Guineas. It is at the Woodbine and in addition to being the oldest racing fixture in America it is also just such a day for Canada as Derby Day is for England. If you go to Toronto for Plate Day--as they call that great race-day--you will be wise to have your hotel accommodations engaged well in advance. You will find Plate Day to be the Saturday before the twenty-fourth of May. And, lest you should have forgotten the significance of the twenty-fourth of May, permit us to remind you that for sixty-four long years loyal Canada celebrated that day as the Queen's birthday. And it is today, perhaps, the most tender tribute that the Canadians can render Victoria--their adherence to her birthday as the greatest of their national holidays.

If you are wise and wish to see the English aspect of Toronto, you will reserve your accommodations at a certain old hotel near the lakefront which is the most intensely British thing that will open to a stranger within the town. Within its dining-room the lion and the unicorn still support the crown, and the old ladies who are ushered to their seats wear white caps and gently pat their flowing black skirts. The accents of the employés are wonderfully British, and if you ask for pens you will surely get "nibs." The old house has an air, which the English would spell "demeanour," and incidentally it has a wonderful faculty of hospitality.