_Roughing It De Luxe__By__Irvin S. Cobb_

[Illustration: BY COMMON CONSENT WE HAD NAMED THEM CLARENCE ANDCLARICE]

_Roughing It De Luxe__By__Irvin S. Cobb_

_Author of "Back Home, "__"The Escape of Mr. Trimm, " "Cobb's Anatomy, "__"Cobb's Bill of Fare, " etc. _

_Illustrated by John T. McCutcheon_

[Illustration]

_New York__George H. Doran Company_

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

TO GEORGE H. DORAN, ESQ. MY FRIEND AND STILL MY PUBLISHER;MY PUBLISHER AND STILLMY FRIEND

_THE TIME TABLE_

 PAGEA PILGRIM CANONIZED 15RABID AND HIS FRIENDS 55HOW DO YOU LIKE THE CLIMATE? 97IN THE HAUNT OF THE NATIVE SON 135LOOKING FOR LO 175

ILLUSTRATIONS

 PAGEBy common consent we had named them Clarence and Clarice FrontispieceEvidently he believed the conspiracy against him was widespread 21There was not a turkey trotter in the bunch 35He'd garner in some fellows that wasn't sheep-herders 61Because a man has a soul is no reason he shouldn't have an appetite 73He was a regular moving picture cowboy and gave general satisfaction 87The boy who sells you a paper and the youth who blackens your shoes both show solicitude 101Out from under a rock somewhere will crawl a real estate agent 115He felt that he was properly dressed for the time, the place and the occasion 127Even the place where the turkey trot originated was trotless and quiet 143The woman nearest the wall has on her furs--it is always cool in the shade 155It's a great thing out there to be a native son 169Each Navajo squaw weaves on an average nine thousand blankets a year 179As she leveled the lens a yell went up from somewhere 193As the occupants spilled sprawlingly through the gap, a front tire exploded with a loud report 207

_A PILGRIM CANONIZED_

[Illustration]

A Pilgrim Canonized

IT is generally conceded that the Grand Cañon of Arizona beggarsdescription. I shall therefore endeavor to refrain from doing so. Irealize that this is going to be a considerable contract. Nearlyeverybody, on taking a first look at the Grand Cañon, comes right outand admits its wonders are absolutely indescribable--and then proceedsto write anywhere from two thousand to fifty thousand words, giving thefull details. Speaking personally, I wish to say that I do not knowanybody who has yet succeeded in getting away with the job. 

In the old days when he was doing the literature for the Barnum show, Tody Hamilton would have made the best nominee I can think of. Remember, don't you, how when Tody started in to write about the elephantquadrille you had to turn over to the next page to find the verb? Andalmost any one of those young fellows who write advertising folders forthe railroads would gladly tackle the assignment; in fact, some of themalready have--but not with any tumultuous success. 

In the presence of the Grand Cañon, language just simply fails you andall the parts of speech go dead lame. When the Creator made it He failedto make a word to cover it. To that extent the thing is incomplete. Ifever I run across a person who can put down on paper what the GrandCañon looks like, that party will be my choice to do the story when theCrack of Doom occurs. I can close my eyes now and see the headlines:Judgment Day a Complete Success! Replete with Incident and Abounding inSurprises--Many Wealthy Families Disappointed--Full Particulars from ourSpecial Correspondent on the Spot!

Starting out from Chicago on the Santa Fé, we had a full trainload. Wecame from everywhere: from peaceful New England towns full of elm treesand oldline Republicans; from the Middle States; and from the land ofchewing tobacco, prominent Adam's apples and hot biscuits--down wherethe r is silent, as in No'th Ca'lina. And all of us--Northerners, Southerners, Easterners alike--were actuated by a common purpose--wewere going West to see the country and rough it--rough it on overlandtrains better equipped and more luxurious than any to be found in theEast; rough it at ten-dollar-a-day hotels; rough it by touring car overthe most magnificent automobile roads to be found on this continent. Wewere a daring lot and resolute; each and every one of us was brave andblithe to endure the privations that such an expedition must inevitablyentail. Let the worst come; we were prepared! If there wasn't any of thehothouse lamb, with imported green peas, left, we'd worry along on alittle bit of the fresh shad roe, and a few conservatory cucumbers onthe side. That's the kind of hardy adventurers we were!

Conspicuous among us was a distinguished surgeon of Chicago; in fact, so distinguished that he has had a very rare and expensive diseasenamed for him, which is as distinguished as a physician ever gets to bein this country. Abroad he would be decorated or knighted. Here we namesomething painful after him and it seems to fill the bill just as well. This surgeon was very distinguished and also very exclusive. After youscaled down from him, riding in solitary splendor in his drawing room, with kitbags full of symptoms and diagnoses scattered round, we became amixed tourist outfit. I would not want to say that any of the persons onour train were impossible, because that sounds snobbish; but I will saythis--some of them were highly improbable. 

There was the bride, who put on her automobile goggles and herautomobile veil as soon as we pulled out of the Chicago yards and nevertook them off again--except possibly when sleeping. I presume she wantedto show the rest of us that she was accustomed to traveling at a highrate of speed. If the bridegroom had only bethought him to carry one ofthose siren horns under his arm, and had tooted it whenever we wentaround a curve, the illusion would have been complete. 

There was also the middle-aged lady with the camera habit. Any time thetrain stopped, or any time it behaved as though it thought of stopping, out on the platform would pop this lady, armed with her littleaccordion-plaited camera, with the lens focused and the little atomizerbulb dangling down, all ready to take a few pictures. She snapshottedwatertanks, whistling posts, lunch stands, section houses, gradecrossings and holes in the snowshed--also scenery, people and climate. Atwo-by-four photograph of a mountain that's a mile high must be a mostsplendid reminder of the beauties of Nature to take home with you from atrip. 

There was the conversational youth in the Norfolk jacket, who was goingout West to fill an important vacancy in a large business house--he toldus so himself. It was a good selection, too. If I had a vacancy that Iwanted filled in such a way that other people would think the vacancywas still there, this youth would have been my candidate. 

[Illustration: EVIDENTLY HE BELIEVED THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST HIM WASWIDESPREAD]

And finally there was the corn-doctor from a town somewhere in Indiana, who had the upper berth in Number Ten. It seemed to take a load off hismind, on the second morning out, when he learned that he would not haveto spend the day up there, but could come down and mingle with the restof us on a common footing; but right up to the finish of the journey hewas uncertain on one or two other points. Every time a conductor camethrough--Pullman conductor, train conductor or dining-car conductor--hewould hail him and ask him this question: "Do I or do I not have tochange at Williams for the Grand Cañon?" The conductor--whicheverconductor it was--always said, Yes, he would have to change at Williams. But he kept asking them--he seemed to regard a conductor as afunctionary who would deliberately go out of his way to mislead apassenger in regard to an important matter of this kind. After a whilethe conductors took to hiding out from him and then he begancross-examining the porters, and the smoking-room attendant, and thebaggageman, and the flagmen, and the passengers who got aboard down theline in Colorado and New Mexico. 

At breakfast in the dining car you would hear his plaintive, patientvoice lifted. "Yes, waiter, " he would say; "fry 'em on both sides, please. And say, waiter, do you know for sure whether we change atWilliams for the Grand Cañon?" He put a world of entreaty into it;evidently he believed the conspiracy against him was widespread. AtAlbuquerque I saw him leading off on one side a Pueblo Indian who waspeddling bows and arrows, and heard him ask the Indian, as man to man, if he would have to change at Williams for the Grand Cañon. 

When he was not worrying about changing at Williams he showed anxietyupon the subject of the proper clothes to be worn while looking at theGrand Cañon. Among others he asked me about it. I could not help him. Ihad decided to drop in just as I was, and then to be governed bycircumstances as they might arise; but he was not organized that way. Onthe morning of the last day, as we rolled up through the pine barrens ofNorthern Arizona toward our destination, those of us who had risen earlybecame aware of a terrific struggle going on behind the shroudingdraperies of that upper berth of his. Convulsive spasms agitated thegreen curtains. Muffled swear words uttered in a low but fervent tonefiltered down to us. Every few seconds a leg or an arm or a head, or thebutt-end of a suitcase, or the bulge of a valise, would show through thecurtains for a moment, only to be abruptly snatched back. 

Speculation concerning the causes of these strange manifestationsran--as the novelists say--rife. Some thought that, overcome withdisappointment by the discovery that we had changed at Williams in themiddle of the night, without his knowing anything about it, he washaving a fit all alone up there. Presently the excitement abated; andthen, after having first lowered his baggage, our friend descended tothe aisle and the mystery was explained. He had solved the question ofwhat to wear while gazing at the Grand Cañon. He was dressed in a newgolf suit, complete--from the dinky cap to the Scotch plaid stockings. If ever that man visits Niagara, I should dearly love to be on hand tosee him when he comes out to view the Falls, wearing his bathing suit. 

Some of us aboard that train did not seem to care deeply for the desert;the cactus possibly disappointed others; and the mesquit failed to givegeneral satisfaction, though at a conservative estimate we passedthrough nine million miles of it. A few of the delegates from theEastern seaboard appeared to be irked by the tribal dancing of the HopiIndians, for there was not a turkey-trotter in the bunch, the Indiansettlements of Arizona being the only terpsichorean centers in thiscountry to which the Young Turk movement had not penetrated yet. Someobjected to the plains because they were so flat and plainlike, and someto the mountains because of their exceedingly mountainous aspect; but onone point we all agreed--on the uniform excellence of the dining-carservice. 

It is a powerfully hard thing for a man to project his personalityacross the grave. In making their wills and providing for the carryingon of their pet enterprises a number of our richest men have endeavoredfrom time to time to disprove this; but, to date, the percentage ofsuccesses has not been large. So far as most of us are concerned theburden of proof shows that in this regard we are one with the famouslittle dog whose name was Rover--when we die, we die all over. Every bigsuccess represents the personality of a living man; rarely ever does itrepresent the personality of a dead man. 

The original Fred Harvey is dead--has been dead, in fact, for severalyears; but his spirit goes marching on across the southwestern half ofthis country. Two thousand miles from salt water, the oysters that areserved on his dining cars do not seem to be suffering from car-sickness. And you can get a beefsteak measuring eighteen inches from tip to tip. There are spring chickens with the most magnificent bust development Iever saw outside of a burlesque show; and the eggs taste as though theymight have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault. Ifthere was only a cabaret show going up and down the middle of the carduring meals, even the New York passengers would be satisfied with theservice, I think. 

There is another detail of the Harvey system that makes you wonder. Outon the desert, in a dead-gray expanse of silence and sagebrush, yourtrain halts at a junction point that you never even heard of before. There is not much to be seen--a depot, a 'dobe cabin or so, a few frameshacks, a few natives, a few Indians and a few incurably languidMexicans--and that is positively all there is except that, right outthere in the middle of nowhere, stands a hotel big enough and handsomeenough for Chicago or New York, built in the Spanish style, with widepatios and pergolas--where a hundred persons might perg at one time--andgay-striped awnings. It is flanked by flower-beds and refreshinglygreen strips of lawn, with spouting fountains scattered about. 

You go inside to a big, spotlessly bright dining room and get as good ameal as you can get anywhere on earth--and served in as good style, too. To the man fresh from the East, such an establishment reminds himvividly of the hurry-up railroad lunch places to which he has beenaccustomed back home--places where the doughnuts are dornicks and thepickles are fossils, and the hard-boiled egg got up out of a sick bed tobe there, and on the pallid yellow surface of the official pie a coupleof hundred flies are enacting Custard's Last Stand. It reminds him ofthem because it is so different. Between Kansas City and the Coast thereare a dozen or more of these hotels scattered along the line. 

And so, with real food to stay you and one of Tuskegee's bright, straw-colored graduates to minister to your wants in the sleeper, youcome on the morning of the third day to the Grand Cañon in northernArizona; you take one look--and instantly you lose all your formerstandards of comparison. You stand there gazing down the raw, red gulletof that great gosh-awful gorge, and you feel your self-importanceshriveling up to nothing inside of you. You haven't an adjective left toyour back. It makes you realize what the sensations would be of onelittle microbe lost inside of Barnum's fat lady. 

I think my preconceived conception of the Cañon was the same conceptionmost people have before they come to see it for themselves--a straightup-and-down slit in the earth, fabulously steep and fabulously deep;nevertheless merely a slit. It is no such thing. 

Imagine, if you can, a monster of a hollow approximately some hundredsof miles long and a mile deep, and anywhere from ten to sixteen mileswide, with a mountain range--the most wonderful mountain range in theworld--planted in it; so that, viewing the spectacle from above, you getthe illusion of being in a stationary airship, anchored up among theclouds; imagine these mountain peaks--hundreds upon hundreds ofthem--rising one behind the other, stretching away in endless, serriedrank until the eye swims and the mind staggers at the task of trying tocount them; imagine them splashed and splattered over with all theearthly colors you ever saw and a lot of unearthly colors you never sawbefore; imagine them carved and fretted and scrolled into allshapes--tabernacles, pyramids, battleships, obelisks, Moorishpalaces--the Moorish suggestion is especially pronounced both incolorings and in shapes--monuments, minarets, temples, turrets, castles, spires, domes, tents, tepees, wigwams, shafts. 

Imagine other ravines opening from the main one, all nuzzling theirmouths in her flanks like so many sucking pigs; for there are hundredsof these lesser cañons, and any one of them would be a marvel were theynot dwarfed into relative puniness by the mother of the litter. Imaginewalls that rise sheer and awful as the Wrath of God, and at their baseholes where you might hide all the Seven Wonders of the Olden World andnever know they were there--or miss them either. Imagine a trail thatwinds like a snake and climbs like a goat and soars like a bird, andfinally bores like a worm and is gone. 

Imagine a great cloud-shadow cruising along from point to point, growingsmaller and smaller still, until it seems no more than a shifting purplebruise upon the cheek of a mountain, and then, as you watch it, losingitself in a tiny rift which at that distance looks like a wrinkle in theseamed face of an old squaw, but which is probably a huge gash goredinto the solid rock for a thousand feet of depth and more than athousand feet of width. 

Imagine, way down there at the bottom, a stream visible only at certainfavored points because of the mighty intervening ribs and chines ofrock--a stream that appears to you as a torpidly crawling yellow worm, its wrinkling back spangled with tarnished white specks, but which isreally a wide, deep, brawling, rushing river--the Colorado--full oftorrents and rapids; and those white specks you see are the tops ofenormous rocks in its bed. 

Imagine--if it be winter--snowdrifts above, with desert flowers bloomingalongside the drifts, and down below great stretches of green verdure;imagine two or three separate snowstorms visibly raging at differentpoints, with clear, bright stretches of distance intervening betweenthem, and nearer maybe a splendid rainbow arching downward into thegreat void; for these meteorological three-ring circuses are notuncommon at certain seasons. 

Imagine all this spread out beneath the unflawed turquoise of theArizona sky and washed in the liquid gold of the Arizona sunshine--andif you imagine hard enough and keep it up long enough you may begin, inthe course of eight or ten years, to have a faint, a very faint andshadowy conception of this spot where the shamed scheme of creation isturned upside down and the very womb of the world is laid bare beforeour impious eyes. Then go to Arizona and see it all for yourself, andyou will realize what an entirely inadequate and deficient thing thehuman imagination is. 

It is customary for the newly arrived visitor to take a ride along theedge of the cañon--the rim-drive, it is called--with stops at Hopi Pointand Mohave Point and Pima Point, and other points where the views aresupposed to be particularly good. To do this you get into a smart coachdrawn by horses and driven by a competent young man in a khaki uniform. Leaving behind you a clutter of hotel buildings and station buildings, bungalows and tents, you go winding away through a Government forestreserve containing much fine standing timber and plenty more that is notso fine, it being mainly stunted piñon and gnarly desert growths. 

Presently the road, which is a fine, wide, macadamized road, skirts outof the trees and threads along the cañon until it comes to a rockyflange that juts far over. You climb out there and, instinctivelytreading lightly on your tiptoes and breathing in syncopated breaths, you steal across the ledge, going slowly and carefully until you pausefinally upon the very eyelashes of eternity and look down into thatgreat inverted muffin-mold of a cañon. 

You are at the absolute jumping-off place. There is nothing between youand the undertaker except six-thousand feet, more or less, of dazzlingArizona climate. Below you, beyond you, stretching both ways from you, lie those buried mountains, the eternal herds of the Lord's cattlefold;there are scars upon their sides, like the marks of a mighty brandingiron, and in the distance, viewed through the vapor-waves of meltingsnow, their sides seem to heave up and down like the flanks of pantingcattle. Half a mile under you, straight as a man can spit, are gardensof willows and grasses and flowers, looking like tiny green patches, andthe tents of a camp looking like scattered playing cards; and there is aplateau down there that appears to be as flat as your hand and isseemingly no larger, but actually is of a size sufficient for theevolutions of a brigade of cavalry. 

[Illustration: THERE WAS NOT A TURKEY TROTTER IN THE BUNCH]

When you have had your fill of this the guide takes you and leadsyou--you still stepping lightly to avoid starting anything--to a spotfrom which he points out to you, riven into the face of a vastperpendicular chasm above a cave like a monstrous door, a tremendousand perfect figure seven--the house number of the Almighty Himself. Bythis I mean no irreverence. If ever Jehovah chose an earthlyabiding-place, surely this place of awful, unutterable majesty would beit. You move a few yards farther along and instantly the seven isgone--the shift of shadow upon the rock wall has wiped it out andobliterated it--but you do not mourn the loss, because there are stillupward of a million things for you to look at. 

And then, if you have timed wisely the hour of your coming, the sunpretty soon goes down; and as it sinks lower and lower out of titaniccrannies come the thickening shades, making new plays and tricks ofpainted colors upon the walls--purples and reds and golds and blues, ambers and umbers and opals and ochres, yellows and tans and tawnys andbrowns--and the cañon fills to its very brim with the silence ofoncoming night. 

You stand there, stricken dumb, your whole being dwarfed yettransfigured; and in the glory of that moment you can even forget thegabble of the lady tourist alongside of you who, after searching hersoul for the right words, comes right out and gives the Grand Cañon hercordial indorsement. She pronounces it to be just perfectly lovely! ButI said at the outset I was not going to undertake to describe the GrandCañon--and I'm not. These few remarks were practically jolted out of meand should not be made to count in the total score. 

Having seen the cañon--or a little bit of it--from the top, the nextthing to do is to go down into it and view it from the sides and thebottom. Most of the visitors follow the Bright Angel Trail which ishandily near by and has an assuring name. There are only two ways to dothe inside of the Grand Cañon--afoot and on mule-back. El Tovar hotelprovides the necessary regalia, if you have not come prepared--dividedskirts for the women and leggings for the men, a mule apiece and a guideto every party of six or eight. 

At the start there is always a lot of nervous chatter--airy persiflageflies to and fro and much laughing is indulged in. But it has a forced, strained sound, that laughter has; it does not come from the heart, theheart being otherwise engaged for the moment. Down a winding footpathmoves the procession, with the guide in front, and behind him in singlefile his string of pilgrims--all as nervous as cats and some holding totheir saddle-pommels with death-grips. Just under the first terrace ahalt is made while the official photographer takes a picture; and whenyou get back he has your finished copy ready for you, so you can see foryourself just how pale and haggard and wall-eyed and how much like atyphoid patient you looked. 

The parade moves on. All at once you notice that the person immediatelyahead of you has apparently ridden right over the wall of the cañon. Amoment ago his arched back loomed before you; now he is utterly gone. Itis at this point that some tourists tender their resignations--to takeeffect immediately. To the credit of the sex, be it said, thestatistics show that fewer women quit here than men. But nearly alwaysthere is some man who remembers where he left his umbrella or something, and he goes back after it and forgets to return. 

In our crowd there was one person who left us here. He was a circularperson; about forty per cent of him, I should say, rhymed with jelly. Heclimbed right down off his mule. He said:

"I'm not scared myself, you understand, but I've just recalled that mywife is a nervous woman. She'd have a fit if she knew I was taking thistrip! I love my wife, and for her sake I will not go down this cañon, dearly as I would love to. " And with that he headed for the hotel. Iwanted to go with him. I wanted to go along with him and comfort him andhelp him have his chill, and if necessary send a telegram for him to hiswife--she was in Pittsburgh--telling her that all was well. But I didnot. I kept on. I have been trying to figure out ever since whether thisshowed courage on my part, or cowardice. 

Over the ridge and down the steep declivity beyond goes your mule, slipping a little. He is reared back until his rump almost brushes thetrail; he grunts mild protests at every lurching step and grips hisshoecalks into the half-frozen path. You reflect that thousands ofpersons have already done this thing; that thousands of others--men, women and children--are going to do it, and that no serious accident hasyet occurred--which is some comfort, but not much. The thought comes toyou that, after all, it is a very bright and beautiful world you areleaving behind. You turn your head to give it a long, lingeringfarewell, and you try to put your mind on something cheerful--such asyour life insurance. Then something happens. 

The trail, that has been slanting at a downward angle which is a triflesteeper than a ship's ladder, but not quite so steep perhaps as a boardfence, takes an abrupt turn to the right. You duck your head and gothrough a little tunnel in the rock, patterned on the same generaldesign of the needle's eye that is going to give so many of ourprominent captains of industry trouble in the hereafter. And as youemerge on the lower side you forget all about your life-insurance papersand freeze to your pommel with both hands, and cram your poor cold feetinto the stirrups--even in warm weather they'll be good and cold--andall your vital organs come up in your throat, where you can taste them. If anybody had shot me through the middle just about then he would haveinflicted only a flesh wound. 

You have come out on a place where the trail clings to the sheer side ofthe dizziest, deepest chasm in the known world. One of your legs isscraping against the everlasting granite; the other is dangling overhalf a mile of fresh mountain air. The mule's off hind hoof grates andgrinds on the flinty trail, dislodging a fair-sized stone that flopsover the verge. You try to look down and see where it is going and findyou haven't the nerve to do it--but you can hear it falling from onenarrow ledge to another, picking up other boulders as it goes untilthere must be a fair-sized little avalanche of them cascading down. Thesound of their roaring, racketing passage grows fainter and fainter, then dies almost out, and then there rises up to you from thoseunutterable depths a dull, thuddy little sound--those stones havereached the cellar! Then to you there comes the pleasing reflection thatif your mule slipped and you fell off and were dashed to fragments, theywould not be large, mussy, irregular fragments, but little teeny-weenyfragments, such as would not bring the blush of modesty to the cheek ofthe most fastidious. 

Only your mule never slips off! It is contrary to a mule's religion andpolitics, and all his traditions and precedents, to slip off. He mayslide a little and stumble once in a while, and he may, with maliceaforethought, try to scrape you off against the outjutting shoulders ofthe trail; but he positively will not slip off. It is not because he isinterested in you. A tourist on the cañon's rim a simple tourist is tohim and nothing more; but he has no intention of getting himself hurt. Instinct has taught that mule it would be to him a highly painfulexperience to fall a couple of thousand feet or so and light on a pileof rocks; and therefore, through motives that are purely selfish, hestudiously refrains from so doing. When the Prophet of old wrote, "Howbeautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him, " and so on, I judge hehad reference to a mule on a narrow trail. 

My mule had one very disconcerting way about him--or, rather, about her, for she was of the gentler sex. When she came to a particularly scaryspot, which was every minute or so, she would stop dead still. Iconcurred in that part of it heartily. But then she would face outwardand crane her neck over the fathomless void of that bottomless pit, andfor a space of moments would gaze steadily downward, with a despondentdroop of her fiddle-shaped head and a suicidal gleam in her mournfuleyes. It worried me no little; and if I had known, at the time, that shehad a German name it would have worried me even more, I guess. Buteither the time was not ripe for the rash act or else she abhorred thethought of being found dead in the company of a mere tourist, so she didnot leap off into space, but restrained herself; and I was very gratefulto her for it. It made a bond of sympathy between us. 

On you go, winding on down past the red limestone and the yellowlimestone and the blue sandstone, which is green generally; past hugebat caves and the big nests of pack-rats, tucked under shelves ofNature's making; past stratified millions of crumbling seashells thattell to geologists the tale of the salt-water ocean that once on a time, when the world was young and callow, filled this hole brim full; andpresently, when you have begun to piece together the tattered fringes ofyour nerves, you realize that the cañon is even more wonderful whenviewed from within than it is when viewed from without. Also, you beginto notice now that it is most extensively autographed. 

Apparently about every other person who came this way remarked tohimself that this cañon was practically completed and only needed hissignature as collaborator to round it out--so he signed it and afterthat it was a finished job. Some of them brought down colored chalk andstencils, and marking pots, and paints and brushes, and cold chisels towork with, which must have been a lot of trouble, but was worth it--itdoes add so greatly to the beauty of the Grand Cañon to find it spangledover with such names as you could hear paged in almost any dollar-a-dayAmerican-plan hotel. The guide pointed out a spot where one of theseinspired authors climbed high up the face of a white cliff and, clingingthere, carved out in letters a foot long his name; and it was one ofthose names that, inscribed upon a register, would instinctively causeany room clerk to reach for the key to an inside one, without bath. Iregret to state that nothing happened to this person. He got down safeand sound; it was a great pity, too. 

By the Bright Angel Trail it is three hours on a mule to the plateau, where there are green summery things growing even in midwinter, andwhere the temperature is almost sultry; and it is an hour or so more tothe riverbed, down at the very bottom. When you finally arrive there andlook up you do not see how you ever got down, for the trail hasmagically disappeared; and you feel morally sure you are never going toget back. If your mule were not under you pensively craning his headrearward in an effort to bite your leg off, you would almost be ready toswear the whole thing was an optical illusion, a wondrous dream. Underthese circumstances it is not so strange that some travelers who havebeen game enough until now suddenly weaken. Their nerves capsize and thegrit runs out of them like sand out of an overturned pail. 

All over this part of Arizona they tell you the story of the lady fromthe southern part of the state--she was a school teacher and the storyhas become an epic--who went down Bright Angel one morning and did notget back until two o'clock the following morning; and then she cameagainst her will in a litter borne by two tired guides, while twoothers walked beside her and held her hands; and she was protesting atevery step that she positively could not and would not go another inch;and she was as hysterical as a treeful of chickadees; her hat was lost, and her glasses were gone, and her hair hung down her back, andaltogether she was a mournful sight to see. 

Likewise the natives will tell you the tale of a man who made the tripby crawling round the more sensational corners upon his hands and knees;and when he got down he took one look up to where, a sheer mile abovehim, the rim of the cañon showed, with the tall pine trees along itsedge looking like the hairs upon a caterpillar's back, and he announcedfirmly that he wished he might choke if he stirred another step. Throughthe miraculous indulgence of a merciful providence he was down, and thatwas sufficient for him; he wasn't going to trifle with his luck. Hewould stay down until he felt good and rested, and then he would returnto his home in dear old Altoona by some other route. He was verypositive about it. There were two guides along, both of them patient andforbearing cowpunchers, and they argued with him. They pointed thatthere was only one suitable way for him to get out of the cañon, andthat was the way by which he had got into it. 

"The trouble with you fellows, " said the man, "is that you are toodad-blamed technical. The point is that I'm here, and here I'm going tostay. "

"But, " they told him, "you can't stay here. You'd starve to death likethat poor devil that some prospectors found in that gulch yonder--turnedto dusty bones, with a pack rat's nest in his chest and a rock under hishead. You'd just naturally starve to death. "

"There you go again, " he said, "importing these trivial foreign mattersinto the discussion. Let us confine ourselves to the main issue, whichis that I am not going back. This rock shall fly from its firm base assoon as I, " he said, or words to that effect. 

So insisting, he sat down, putting his own firm base against the saidrock, and prepared to become a permanent resident. He was a grown manand the guides were less gentle with him than they had been with thelady school teacher. They roped his arms at the elbows and hoisted himupon a mule and tied his legs together under the mule's belly, and theybrought him out of there like a sack of bran--only he made more noisethan any sack of bran has ever been known to make. 

Coming back up out of the Grand Cañon is an even more inspiring andamazing performance than going down. But by now--anyhow this was myexperience, and they tell me it is the common experience--you arebeginning to get used to the sensation of skirting along the raw andragged verge of nothing. Narrow turns where, going down, your hairpushed your hat off, no longer affright you; you take themjauntily--almost debonairly. You feel that you are now an oldmountain-scaler, and your soul begins to crave for a trip with a fewmore thrills to the square inch in it. You get your wish. You go downHermit Trail, which its middle name is thrills; and there you make theacquaintance of the Hydrophobic Skunk. 

The Hydrophobic Skunk is a creature of such surpassing accomplishmentsand vivid personality that I feel he is entitled to a new chapter. TheHydrophobic Skunk will be continued in our next. 

_RABID AND HIS FRIENDS_

[Illustration]

_Rabid and His Friends_

THE Hydrophobic Skunk resides at the extreme bottom of the Grand Cañonand, next to a Southern Republican who never asked for a Federal office, is the rarest of living creatures. He is so rare that nobody ever sawhim--that is, nobody except a native. I met plenty of tourists who hadseen people who had seen him, but never a tourist who had seen him withhis own eyes. In addition to being rare, he is highly gifted. 

I think almost anybody will agree with me that the common, ordinaryskunk has been most richly dowered by Nature. To adorn a skunk with anyextra qualifications seems as great a waste of the raw material aspainting the lily or gilding refined gold. He is already amply equippedfor outdoor pursuits. Nobody intentionally shoves him round; everybodygives him as much room as he seems to need. He commands respect--nay, more than that, respect and veneration--wherever he goes. Joy-ridersnever run him down and foot passengers avoid crowding him into a corner. You would think Nature had done amply well by the skunk; but no--theHydrophobic Skunk comes along and upsets all these calculations. Besidescarrying the traveling credentials of an ordinary skunk, he is rabid inthe most rabidissimus form. He is not mad just part of the time, likeone's relatives by marriage--and not mad most of the time, like theold-fashioned railroad ticket agent--but mad all the time--incurably, enthusiastically and unanimously mad! He is mad and he is glad of it. 

We made the acquaintance of the Hydrophobic Skunk when we rode downHermit Trail. The casual visitor to the Grand Cañon first of all takesthe rim drive; then he essays Bright Angel Trail, which is sufficientlyscary for his purposes until he gets used to it; and after that he growsmore adventurous and tackles Hermit Trail, which is a marvel ofcorkscrew convolutions, gimleting its way down this red abdominal woundof a cañon to the very gizzard of the world. 

Alongside the Hermit, traveling the Bright Angel is the same asgathering the myrtles with Mary; but the civil engineers who worked outthe scheme of the Hermit and made it wide and navigable for ordinaryfolks were bright young men. They laid a wall along its outer side allthe way from the top to the bottom. Now this wall is made of loosestones racked up together without cement, and it is nowhere more than afoot or a foot and a half high. If your mule ever slipped--which henever does--or if you rolled off on your own hook--which has nothappened to date--that puny little wall would hardly stop you--might noteven cause you to hesitate. But some way, intervening between you and athousand feet or so of uninterrupted fresh air, it gives a tremendoussense of security. Life is largely a state of mind, anyhow, I reckon. 

As a necessary preliminary to going down Hermit Trail you take abuckboard ride of ten miles--ten wonderful miles! Almost immediately theroad quits the rocky, bare parapet of the gorge and winds off throughthe noble, big forest that is a part of the Government reserve. Jaysthat are twice as large and three times as vocal as the Eastern varietyweave blue threads in the green background of the pines; and if there issnow upon the ground its billowy white surface is crossed andcriss-crossed with the dainty tracks of coyotes, and sometimes with thebroad, furry marks of the wildcat's pads. The air is a blessing and thesunshine is a benediction. 

Away off yonder, through a break in the conifers, you see one lone andlofty peak with a cap of snow upon its top. The snow fills the deeperravines that furrow its side downward from the summit so that at thisdistance it looks as though it were clutched in a vast white owl's claw;and generally there is a wispy cloud caught on it like a white shirt ona poor man's Monday washpole. Or, huddled together in a nest formationlike so many speckled eggs, you see the clutch of little mottledmountains for which nobody seems to have a name. If these mountains werein Scotland, Sir Walter Scott and Bobby Burns would have written aboutthem and they would be world-famous, and tourists from America wouldcome and climb their slopes, and stand upon their tops, and sop upromance through all their pores. But being in Arizona, dwarfed by theheaven-reaching ranges and groups that wall them in north, south andwest, they have not even a Christian name to answer to. 

Anon--that is to say, at the end of those ten miles--you come to thehead of Hermit Trail. There you leave your buckboard at a way stationand mount your mule. Presently you are crawling downward, like a fly ona board fence, into the depths of the chasm. You pass through rapidlysucceeding graduations of geology, verdure, scenery and temperature. Youride past little sunken gardens full of wild flowers and stunty firtrees, like bits of Old Japan; you climb naked red slopes crowned withthe tall cactus, like Old Mexico; you skirt bald, bare, blisteredvistas of desolation, like Old Perdition. You cross Horsethief's Trail, which was first traced out by the moccasined feet of marauding Apachesand later was used by white outlaws fleeing northward with their stolenpony herds. 

You pass above the gloomy shadows of Blythe's Abyss and wind beneath agreat box-shaped formation of red sandstone set on a spindle rock andbalancing there in dizzy space like Mohammed's coffin; and then, at theend of a mile-long jog along a natural terrace stretching itself midwaybetween Heaven and the other place, you come to the residence of Shorty, the official hermit of the Grand Cañon. 

[Illustration: HE'D GARNER IN SOME FELLOWS THAT WASN'T SHEEPHERDERS]

Shorty is a little, gentle old man, with warped legs and mild blue eyesand a set of whiskers of such indeterminate aspect that you cannot tellat first look whether they are just coming out or just going back in. Hebelongs--or did belong--to the vast vanishing race of old-time goldprospectors. Halfway down the trail he does light housekeeping under anaccommodating flat ledge that pouts out over the pathway like asnuffdipper's under lip. He has a hole in the rock for his chimney, abreadth of weathered gray canvas for his door and an eighty-mile stretchof the most marvelous panorama on earth for his front yard. He minds thetrail and watches out for the big boulders that sometimes fall in thenight; and, except in the tourist season, he leads a reasonably quietexistence. 

Alongside of Shorty, Robinson Crusoe was a tenement-dweller, and Jonah, weekending in the whale, had a perfectly uproarious time; but Shortythrives on a solitude that is too vast for imagining. He would not tradejobs with the most potted potentate alive--only sometimes in mid-summerhe feels the need of a change stealing over him, and then he goes afootout into the middle of Death Valley and spends a happy vacation of fiveor six weeks with the Gila monsters and the heat. He takes Toby withhim. 

Toby is a gentlemanly little woolly dog built close to the earth like acarpet sweeper, with legs patterned crookedly--after the model of hismaster's. Toby has one settled prejudice: he dislikes Indians. You haveonly to whisper the word "Injun" and instantly Toby is off, scuttlingaway to the highest point that is handy. From there he peers all roundlooking for red invaders. Not finding any he comes slowly back, crushedto the earth with disappointment. Nobody has ever been able to decidewhat Toby would do with the Indians if he found them; but he and Shortyare in perfect accord. They have been associated together ever sinceToby was a pup and Shorty went into the hermit business, and that wasten years ago. Sitting cross-legged on a flat rock like a little gnome, with his puckered eyes squinting off at space, Shorty told us how onceupon a time he came near losing Toby. 

"Me and Toby, " he said, "was over to Flagstaff, and that was severalyears ago. There was a saloon man over there owned a bulldog and hewanted that his bulldog and Toby should fight. Toby can lick mighty nighany dog alive; but I didn't want that Toby should fight. But this heresaloon man wouldn't listen. He sicked his bulldog on to Toby and inabout a minute Toby was taking that bulldog all apart. 

"This here saloon man he got mad then--he got awful mad. He wanted tokill Toby and he pulled out his pistol. I begged him mighty hard pleasenot to shoot Toby--I did so! I stood in front of Toby to protect him andI begged that man not to do it. Then some other fellows made him put uphis gun, and me and Toby came on away from there. " His voice trailedoff. "I certainly would 'a' hated to lose Toby. We set a heap of storeby one another--don't we, dog?" And Toby testified that it wasso--testified with wriggling body and licking tongue and dancing eyesand a madly wagging stump tail. 

As we mounted and jogged away we looked back, and the pair ofthem--Shorty and Toby--were sitting there side by side in perfectharmony and perfect content; and I could not help wondering, in acountry where we sometimes hang a man for killing a man, what wouldhave been adequate punishment for a brute who would kill Toby and leaveShorty without his partner! In another minute, though, we had rounded ajagged sandstone shoulder and they were out of sight. 

About that time Johnny, our guide, felt moved to speech, and wehearkened to his words and hungered for more, for Johnny knows theranges of the Northwest as a city dweller knows his own little sidestreet. In the fall of the year Johnny comes down to the Cañon andserves as a guide a while; and then, when he gets so he just can't standassociating with tourists any longer, he packs his warbags and journeysback to the Northern Range and enjoys the company of cows a spell. Cowsare not exactly exciting, but they don't ask fool questions. 

A highly competent young person is Johnny and a cowpuncher of parts. Most of the Cañon guides are cowpunchers--accomplished ones, too, and ofhigh standing in the profession. With a touch of reverence Johnnypointed out to us Sam Scovel, the greatest bronco buster of his time, now engaged in piloting tourists. 

"Can he ride?" echoed Johnny in answer to our question. "Scovel couldride an earthquake if she stood still long enough for him to mount! Herode Steamboat--not Young Steamboat, but Old Steamboat! He rode RockingChair, and he's the only man that ever did do that and not be called onin a couple of days to attend his own funeral. "

This day he told us about one Tom, who lived up in Wyoming, where Johnnycame from. It appeared that in an easier day Tom was hired by somecattle men to thin out the sheep herders who insisted upon invading thepublic ranges. By Johnny's account Tom did the thinning withconscientious attention to detail and gave general satisfaction for awhile; but eventually he grew careless in his methods and took tokilling parties who were under the protection of the game laws. Likewisehis own private collection of yearlings began to increase with arapidity which was only to be accounted for on the theory that a largenumber of calves were coming into the world with Tom's brand for abirthmark. So he lost popularity. Several times his funeral was privilyarranged, but on each occasion was postponed owing to the failure of thecorpse to be present. Finally he killed a young boy and was caught andconvicted, and one morning they took him out and hanged him ratherextensively. 

"Tom was mighty methodical, " said Johnny. "He got five hundred a headfor killing sheep herders--that was the regular tariff. Every time hebumped one off he'd put a stone under his head, which was his privatemark--a kind of a duebill, as you might say. And when they'd find thatdead herder with the rock under his head they'd know there was anotherfive hundred comin' to Tom on the books; they always paid it, too. Oncein a while, though, he'd cut loose in a saloon and garner in somefellows that wasn't sheep herders. There was quite a number that thoughtTom acted kind of ungentlemanly when he was drinkin'. "

We went on and on at a lazy mule-trot, hearing the unwritten annals ofthe range from one who had seen them enacted at first hand. Pretty soonwe passed a herd of burros with mealy, dusty noses and spotty hides, feeding on prickly pears and rock lichens; and just before sunset weslid down the last declivity out upon the plateau and came to a camp aswas a camp!

This was roughing it de luxe with a most de-luxey vengeance! Here werethree tents, or rather three canvas houses, with wooden half-walls; andthey were spick-and-span inside and out, and had glass windows in themand doors and matched wooden floors. The one that was a bedroom had gayNavajo blankets on the floor, and a stove in it, and a little bureau, and a washstand with white towels and good lathery soap. And there weretwo beds--not cots or bunks, but regular beds--with wire springs andmattresses and white sheets and pillowslips. They were not veteransheets and vintage pillowslips either, but clean and spotless ones. Themess tent was provided with a table with a clean cloth to go over it, and there were china dishes and china cups and shiny knives, forks andspoons. Every scrap of this equipment had been brought down from the topon burro packs. The Grand Cañon is scenically artistic, but it is anon-producing district. And outside there was a corral for the mules; acanvas storehouse; hitching stakes for the burros; a Dutch oven, and alittle forge where the guides sometimes shoe a mule. They aren'tblacksmiths; they merely have to be. Bill was in charge of the camp--adark, rangy, good-looking young leading man of a cowboy, wearing hisblue shirt and his red neckerchief with an air. He spoke with the softTexas drawl and in his way was as competent as Johnny. 

The sun, which had been winking farewells to us over the rim above, dropped out of sight as suddenly as though it had fallen into a well. From the bottom the shadows went slanting along the glooming walls ofthe gorges, swallowing up the yellow patches of sunlight that stilllingered near the top like blacksnakes swallowing eggs. Every second thecolors shifted and changed; what had been blue a moment before was nowpurple and in another minute would be a velvety black. A little lostghost of an echo stole out of a hole and went straying up and down, feebly mocking our remarks and making them sound cheap and tawdry. 

Then the new moon showed as a silver fish, balancing on its tail andarching itself like a hooked skipjack. In a purpling sky the starspopped out like pinpricks and the peace that passes all understandingcame over us. I wish to take advantage of this opportunity to say that, in my opinion, David Belasco has never done anything in the way ofscenic effects to beat a moonrise in the Grand Cañon. 

I reckon we might have been there until now--my companion and I--soakingour souls in the unutterable beauty of that place, only just about thattime we smelled something frying. There was also a most delectablesputtering sound as of fat meat turning over on a hot skillet; but justthe smell alone was a square meal for a poor family. The meetingadjourned by acclamation. Just because a man has a soul is no reason heshouldn't have an appetite. 

That Johnny certainly could cook! Served on china dishes upon acloth-covered table, we had mounds of fried steaks and shoals of friedbacon; and a bushel, more or less, of sheepherder potatoes; and greenpeas and sliced peaches out of cans; and sourdough biscuits as light askisses and much more filling; and fresh butter and fresh milk; andcoffee as black as your hat and strong as sin. How easy it is forcivilized man to become primitive and comfortable in his way of eating, especially if he has just ridden ten miles on a buckboard and nine moreon a mule and is away down at the bottom of the Grand Cañon--and thereis nobody to look on disapprovingly when he takes a bite that would be acredit to a steam shovel!

[Illustration: BECAUSE A MAN HAS A SOUL IS NO REASON HE SHOULDN'T HAVEAN APPETITE]

Despite all reports to the contrary, I wish to state that it is notrouble at all to eat green peas off a knifeblade--you merely mix themin with potatoes for a cement; and fried steak--take it from an oldsteak-eater--tastes best when eaten with those tools of Nature's ownproviding, both hands and your teeth. An hour passed--busy, yetpleasant--and we were both gorged to the gills and had reared back withour cigars lit to enjoy a third jorum of black coffee apiece, whenJohnny, speaking in an offhand way to Bill, who was still hiding awaybiscuits inside of himself like a parlor prestidigitator, said:

"Seen any of them old hydrophobies the last day or two?"

"Not so many, " said Bill casually. "There was a couple out last nightpirootin' round in the moonlight. I reckon, though, there'll be quite aflock of 'em out tonight. A new moon always seems to fetch 'em up fromthe river. "

Both of us quit blowing on our coffee and we put the cups down. I thinkI was the one who spoke. 

"I beg your pardon, " I asked, "but what did you say would be outtonight?"

"We were just speakin' to one another about them Hydrophoby Skunks, "said Bill apologetically. "This here Cañon is where they mostly hang outand frolic 'round. "

I laid down my cigar, too. I admit I was interested. 

"Oh!" I said softly--like that. "Is it? Do they?"

"Yes, " said Johnny. "I reckin there's liable to be one come shovin' hisold nose into that door any minute. Or probably two--they mostly travelsin pairs--sets, as you might say. "

"You'd know one the minute you saw him, though, " said Bill. "They'resmaller than a regular skunk and spotted where the other kind isstriped. And they got little red eyes. You won't have no trouble at allrecognizin' one. "

It was at this juncture that we both got up and moved back by the stove. It was warmer there and the chill of evening seemed to be settling downnoticeably. 

"Funny thing about Hydrophoby Skunks, " went on Johnny after a moment ofpensive thought--"mad, you know!"

"What makes them mad?" The two of us asked the question together. 

"Born that way!" explained Bill--"mad from the start, and won't never donothin' to get shut of it. "

"Ahem--they never attack humans, I suppose?"

"Don't they?" said Johnny, as if surprised at such ignorance. "Why, humans is their favorite pastime! Humans is just pie to a HydrophobySkunk. It ain't really any fun to be bit by a Hydrophoby Skunk neither. "He raised his coffee cup to his lips and imbibed deeply. 

"Which you certainly said something then, Johnny, " stated Bill. "Yousee, " he went on, turning to us, "they aim to catch you asleep and theycreep up right soft and take holt of you--take holt of a yearusually--and clamp their teeth and just hang on for further orders. Somesays they hang on till it thunders, same as snappin' turtles. But that'sa lie, I judge, because there's weeks on a stretch down here when itdon't thunder. All the cases I ever heard of they let go at sun-up. "

"It is right painful at the time, " said Johnny, taking up the thread ofthe narrative; "and then in nine days you go mad yourself. Remember thatfellow the Hydrophoby Skunk bit down here by the rapids, Bill? Let'ssee now--what was that hombre's name?"

"Williams, " supplied Bill--"Heck Williams. I saw him at Flagstaff whenthey took him there to the hospital. That guy certainly did carry onregardless. First he went mad and his eyes turned red, and he got so hedidn't have no real use for water--well, them prospectors don't nevercare much about water anyway--and then he got to snappin' and bitin' andfoamin' so's they had to strap him down to his bed. He got loosethough. "

"Broke loose, I suppose?" I said. 

"No, he bit loose, " said Bill with the air of one who would not deceiveyou even in a matter of small details. 

"Do you mean to say he bit those leather straps in two?"

"No, sir; he couldn't reach them, " explained Bill, "so he bit the bed intwo. Not in one bite, of course, " he went on. "It took him several. Isaw him after he was laid out. He really wasn't no credit to himself asa corpse. "

I'm not sure, but I think my companion and I were holding hands by now. Outside we could hear that little lost echo laughing to itself. It wasno time to be laughing either. Under certain circumstances I don't knowof a lonelier place anywhere on earth than that Grand Cañon. 

Presently my friend spoke, and it seemed to me his voice was a mitehusky. Well, he had a bad cold. 

"You said they mostly attack persons who are sleeping out, didn't you?"

"That's right, too, " said Johnny, and Bill nodded in affirmation. 

"Then, of course, since we sleep indoors everything will be all right, "I put in. 

"Well, yes and no, " answered Johnny. "In the early part of the evening ahydrophoby is liable to do a lot of prowlin' round outdoors; but towardmornin' they like to get into camps--they dig up under the side walls orcome up through the floor--and they seem to prefer to get in bed withyou. They're cold-blooded, I reckin, same as rattlesnakes. Cool nightsalways do drive 'em in, seems like. "

"It's going to be sort of coolish to-night, " said Bill casually. 

It certainly was. I don't remember a chillier night in years. My teethwere chattering a little--from cold--before we turned in. I retired withall my clothes on, including my boots and leggings, and I wished I hadbrought along my earmuffs. I also buttoned my watch into my lefthandshirt pocket, the idea being if for any reason I should conclude to moveduring the night I would be fully equipped for traveling. The door wouldnot stay closely shut--the doorjamb had sagged a little and the windkept blowing the door ajar. But after a while we dozed off. 

It was one-twenty-seven A. M. When I woke with a violent start. I knowthis was the exact time because that was when my watch stopped. I peeredabout me in the darkness. The door was wide open--I could tell that. Down on the floor there was a dragging, scuffling sound, and from almostbeneath me a pair of small red eyes peered up phosphorescently. 

"He's here!" I said to my companion as I emerged from my blankets; andhe, waking instantly, seemed instinctively to know whom I meant. I usedto wonder at the ease with which a cockroach can climb a perfectlysmooth wall and run across the ceiling. I know now that to do this isthe easiest thing in the world--if you have the proper incentive behindyou. I had gone up one wall of the tent and had crossed over and was inthe act of coming down the other side when Bill burst in, his eyesblurred with sleep, a lighted lamp in one hand and a gun in the other. 

I never was so disappointed in my life because it wasn't a HydrophobicSkunk at all. It was a pack rat, sometimes called a trade rat, paying usa visit. The pack or trade rat is also a denizen of the Grand Cañon. Heis about four times as big as an ordinary rat and has an appetite tocorrespond. He sometimes invades your camp and makes free with yourthings, but he never steals anything outright--he merely trades withyou; hence his name. He totes off a side of meat or a bushel of meal andbrings a cactus stalk in; or he will confiscate your saddlebags andleave you in exchange a nice dry chip. He is honest, but from what Ican gather he never gets badly stuck on a deal. 

Next morning at breakfast Johnny and Bill were doing a lot of laughingbetween them over something or other. But we had our revenge! Aboutnoon, as we were emerging at the head of the trail, we met one of theguides starting down with a couple that, for the sake of convenience, wehad christened Clarence and Clarice. Shorty hailed us. 

"How's everything down at the camp?" he inquired. 

"Oh, all right!" replied Bill--"only there's a good many of themHydrophoby Skunks pesticatin' about. Last night we seen four. "

Clarence and Clarice crossed startled glances, and it seemed to me thatClarice's cheek paled a trifle; or it may have been Clarence's cheekthat paled. He bent forward and asked Shorty something, and as wedeparted full of joy and content we observed that Shorty was composinghimself to unload that stock horror tale. It made us very happy. 

By common consent we had named them Clarence and Clarice on theirarrival the day before. At first glance we decided they must have comefrom Back Bay, Boston--probably by way of Lenox, Newport and Palm Beach;if Harvard had been a co-educational institution we should have figuredthem as products of Cambridge. It was a shock to us all when we learnedthey really hailed from Chicago. They were nearly of a height and abreadth, and similar in complexion and general expression; andimmediately after arriving they had appeared for the ride down theBright Angel in riding suits that were identical in color, cut andeffect--long-tailed, tight-buttoned coats; derby hats; stock collars;shiny top boots; cute little crops, and form-fitting riding trouserswith those Bartlett pear extensions midships and aft--and the prevalentcolor was a soft, melting, misty gray, like a cow's breath on a frostymorning. Evidently they had both patronized the same tailor. 

He was a wonder, that tailor. Using practically the same stage effects, he had, nevertheless, succeeded in making Clarence look feminine andClarice look masculine. We had gone down to the rim to see them off. Andwhen they passed us in all the gorgeousness of their city bridle-pathregalia, enthroned on shaggy mules, behind a flock of tourists innondescript yet appropriate attire, and convoyed by a cowboy who had noreverence in his soul for the good, the sweet and the beautiful, butkept sniggering to himself in a low, coarse way, we felt--all ofus--that if we never saw another thing we were amply repaid for ourjourney to Arizona. 

The exactly opposite angle of this phenomenon was presented by a certainEastern writer, a member, as I recall, of the Jersey City school of WildWest story writers, who went to Arizona about two years ago to see ifthe facts corresponded with his fiction; if not he would take steps tohave the facts altered--I believe that was the idea. He reached El Tovarat Grand Cañon in the early morning, hurried at once to his room andpresently appeared attired for breakfast. Competent eyewitnesses gaveme the full details. He wore a flannel shirt that was unbuttoned at thethroat to allow his Adam's apple full sweep, a hunting coat, buckskinpants and high boots, and about his waist was a broad belt supporting onone side a large revolver--one of the automatic kind, which you start into shooting by pulling the trigger merely and then have to throw abucket of water on it to make it stop--and on the other side, as acounterpoise, was a buck-handled bowie knife such as was so universallynot used by the early pioneers of our country. 

As he crossed the lobby, jangling like a milk wagon, he created apronounced impression upon all beholders. The hotel is managed by anable veteran of the hotel business, assisted by a charming andaccomplished wife; it is patronized by scientists, scholars andcosmopolitans, who come from all parts of the world to see the GrandCañon; and it is as up-to-the-minute in its appointments and service asthough it fronted on Broadway, or Chestnut Street, or PennsylvaniaAvenue. 

Our hero careened across the intervening space. On reaching the diningroom he snatched off his coat and, with a gesture that would have turnedHackett or Faversham as green with envy as a processed stringbean, flungit aside and prepared to enter. It was plain that he proposed to put onno airs before the simple children of the desert wilds. He would eat hisantelope steak and his grizzly b'ar chuck in his shirt-sleeves, the wayKit Carson and Old Man Bridger always did. 

[Illustration: HE WAS A REGULAR MOVING PICTURE COWBOY AND GAVE GENERALSATISFACTION]

The young woman who presides over the dining room met him at the door. In the cool, clarified accents of a Wellesley graduate, which she is, she invited him to have on his things if he didn't mind. She alsooffered to take care of his hardware for him while he was eating. Heconsented to put his coat back on, but he clung to his weapons--therewas no telling when the Indians might start an uprising. Probably at themoment it would have deeply pained him to learn that the only Indianuprising reported in these parts in the last forty years was a carbuncleon the back of the neck of Uncle Hopi Hooligan, the gentlecopper-colored floorwalker of the white-goods counter in the Hopi House, adjacent to the hotel!

However, he stayed on long enough to discover that even this far westordinary human garments make a most excellent protective covering forthe stranger. Many of the tourists do not do this. They arrive in themorning, take a hurried look at the Cañon, mail a few postal cards, buya Navajo blanket or two and are out again that night. Yet they couldstay on for a month and make every hour count. To begin with, there isthe Cañon, worth a week of anybody's undivided attention. Within easyreach are the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forests--thousands ofacres of trees turned to solid agate. If these things were in Europethey would be studded thick with hotels and Americans by the thousandwould flock across the seas to look at them. There are cliff-dwellers'ruins older than ancient Babylon and much less expensive. 

The reservations of the Hopis and the Navajos, most distinctive of allthe Southern tribes, are handy, while all about stretches a bigGovernment reserve full of natural wonders and unnatural ones, too--everything on earth except a Lover's Leap. There are unexcelledfacilities for Lover's Leaps, too--thousands of appropriate places arewithin easy walking distance of the hotel; but no lover ever yet caredto leap where he would have to drop five or six thousand feet before helanded. He'd be such a mussy lover; no satisfaction to himself then--orto the undertaker, either. 

However, as I was saying, most of the tourists run in on the morningtrain and out again on the evening train. To this breed belonged a youthwho dropped in during our stay; I think he must have followed the crowdin. As he came out from breakfast I chanced to be standing on the sideveranda and I presume he mistook me for one of the hired help. Thismistake has occurred before when I was stopping at hotels. 

"My friend, " he said to me in the patronizing voice of an experiencedtraveler, "is there anything interesting to see round here at this timeof day?"

Either he had not heard there was a Grand Cañon going on regularly inthat vicinity or he may have thought it was open only for matinees andevenings. So I took him by the hand and led him over to the curio storeand let him look at the Mexican drawnwork. It seemed to satisfy him, too--until by chance he glanced out of a window and discovered that theCañon was in the nature of a continuous performance. 

The same week there arrived a party of six or eight Easterners whoyearned to see some of those real genuine Wild Western characters suchas they had met so often in a film. The manager trotted out a troupe oftrail guides for them--all ex-cowboys; but they, being merely half adozen sunburned, quiet youths in overalls, did not fill the bill at all. The manager hated to have his guests depart disappointed. Privately hecalled his room clerk aside and told him the situation and the roomclerk offered to oblige. 

The room clerk had come from Ohio two years before and was a mightyaccommodating young fellow. He slipped across to the curio store and puton a big hat and some large silver spurs and a pair of leather chapsmade by one of the most reliable mail-order houses in this country. Thuscaparisoned, he mounted a pony and came charging across the lawn, uttering wild ki-yis and quirting his mount at every jump. He steeredright up the steps to the porch where the delighted Easterners wereassembled, and then he yanked the pony back on his haunches and held himthere with one hand while with the other he rolled a brown-papercigarette--which was a trick he had learned in a high-school frat atCincinnati--and altogether he was the picture of a regularmoving-picture cowboy and gave general satisfaction. 

If the cowboys are disappointing in their outward aspect, however, Captain Jim Hance is not. The captain is the official prevaricator ofthe Grand Cañon. It is probably the only salaried job of the sort in theworld--his competitors in the same line of business mainly work for thelove of it. He is a venerable retired prospector who is speciallyretained by the Santa Fe road for the sole purpose of stuffing thecasual tourist with the kind of fiction the casual tourist's systemseems to crave. He just moons round from spot to spot, romancing as hegoes. 

Two of the captain's standbys have been advertised to the world. One ofthem deals with the sad fate of his bride, who on her honeymoon fell offinto the Cañon and lodged on a rim three hundred feet below. "I was twodays gettin' down to the poor little thing, " he tells you, "and then Iseen both her hind legs was broke. " Here the captain invariably pausesand looks out musingly across the Cañon until the victim bites with animpatient "What happened then?" "Oh, I knew she wouldn't be no use to meany more as a bride--so I shot her!" The other tale he saves up untilsome tenderfoot notices the succession of blazes upon the treetrunksalong one of the forest trails and wants to know what made thosepeculiar marks upon the bark all at the same height from the earth. Captain Hance explains that he himself did it--with his elbows andknees--while fleeing from a war party of Apaches. 

His newest one, though--the one he is featuring this year--is, in theopinion of competent judges, the gem of the Hance collection. Itconcerns the fate of one Total Loss Watkins, an old and devoted friendof the captain. As a preliminary he leads a group of wide-eared, doe-eyed victims to the rim of the Cañon. "Right here, " he sayssorrowfully, "was where poor old Total slipped off one day. It's twothousand feet to the first ledge and we thought he was a gone fawnskin, sure! But he had on rubber boots, and he had the presence of mind tolight standing up. He bounced up and down for two days and nightswithout stoppin', and then we had to get a wingshot to kill him in orderto keep him from starvin' to death. "

The next stop will be Southern California, the Land of PerpetualSunshine--except when it rains!

_HOW DO YOU LIKE THE CLIMATE?_

[Illustration]

_How Do You Like the Climate?_

ONCE upon a time a stranger went to Southern California; and when he wasasked the customary question--to wit: "How do you like the climate?" hesaid: "No, I don't like it!" So they destroyed him on the spot. I haveforgotten now whether they merely hanged him on the nearest tree orburned him at the stake; but they destroyed him utterly and hid hisbones in an unmarked grave. 

History, that lying jade, records that when Balboa first saw the Pacifiche plunged breast-deep into the waves, drew his sword and waved it onhigh, probably using for that purpose the Australian crawl stroke; andthen, in that generous and carefree way of the early discoverers, claimed the ocean and all points west in the name of his CatholicMajesty, Carlos the Cutup, or Pedro the Impossible, or whoever happenedto be the King of Spain for the moment. Personal investigation convincesme that the current version of the above incident was wrong. 

What Balboa did first was to state that he liked the climate better thanany climate he'd ever met; was perfectly crazy about it, in fact, andintended to sell out back East and move West just as soon as he couldget word home to his folks; after which, still following the custom ofthe country, he bought a couple of Navajo blankets and some moccasinswith blue beadwork on the toes, mailed a few souvenir postcards to closefriends, and had his photograph taken showing him standing in the midstof the tropical verdure, with a freshly picked orange in his hand. Andif he waved his sword at all it was with the idea of forcing thereal-estate agents to stand back and give him air. I am sure that theseare the correct details, because that is what every round-tripper doesupon arriving in Southern California; and, though Balboa finished hislittle jaunt of explorations at a point some distance below theCalifornia state line, he was still in the climate belt. Life out therein that fair land is predicated on climate; out there climate iscapitalized, organized and systematized. Every native is a climatebooster; so is every newcomer as soon as he has stuck round long enoughto get the climate habit, which is in from one to three days. They talkclimate; they think climate; they breathe it by day; they snore it bynight; and in between times they live on it. And it is good living, too--especially for the real-estate people and the hotel-keepers. 

Southern Californians brag of their climate just as New York brags ofits wickedness and its skyscrapers, and as Richmond brags of its cookingand its war memories. I don't blame them either; the California climateis worth all the brags it gets. Back East in the wintertime we haveweather; out in Southern California they never have weather--nothing butclimate. For hours on hours a native will stand outdoors, with his hatoff and his head thrown back, inhaling climate until you can hear hisnostrils smack. And after you've been on the spot a day or two you'redoing the same thing yourself, for, in addition to being salubrious, theCalifornia climate is catching. 

[Illustration: THE BOY WHO SELLS YOU A PAPER AND THE YOUTH WHO BLACKENSYOUR SHOES BOTH SHOW SOLICITUDE]

Just as soon as you cross the Arizona line you discover that you haveentered the climate belt. As your train whizzes past the monument thatmarks the boundary an earnest-minded passenger leans over, taps you onthe breastbone and informs you that you are now in California, andwishes to know, as man to man, whether you don't regard the climate asabout the niftiest article in that line you ever experienced! At thehotel the young lady of the telephone switchboard, who calls you in themorning, plugs in the number of your room; and when you drowsily answerthe bell she informs you that it is now eight-thirty and--What do youthink of the climate? The boy who sells you a paper and the youth whoblackens your shoes both show solicitude to elicit your views upon thisparamount subject. 

At breakfast the waiter finds out--if he can--how you like the climatebefore finding out how you like your eggs. When you pay your bill ongoing away the clerk somehow manages to convey the impression that thecharges have been remarkably moderate considering what you have enjoyedin the matter of climate. Punching your round-trip ticket on the trainstarting East, the conductor has a few well-merited words to speak onbehalf of the climate of the Glorious Southland, the same being thefavorite pet name of the resident classes for the entire lower end ofthe state of California. 

Everybody is doing it, including press, pulpit and general public. Theweather story--beg pardon, the climate story--is the most importantthing in the daily paper, especially if a blizzard has opportunelydeveloped back East somewhere and is available for purposes ofcomparison. At Los Angeles, which is the great throbbing heart of theclimate belt, I went as a guest to a stag given at the handsome newclubhouse of a secret order renowned the continent over for itshospitality and its charities. We sat, six or seven hundred of us, in abig assembly hall, smoked cigars and drank light drinks, and witnessedsome corking good sparring bouts by non-professional talent. There weretwo or three ministers present--fine, alert representatives of themodern type of city clergymen. When eleven o'clock came the master ofceremonies announced the toast, To Our Absent Brothers! and called uponone of those clergymen to respond to it. 

The minister climbed up on the platform--a tall man, with a thick cropof hair and a profile as clean cut as a cameo and as mobile as anactor's, the face of a born orator. He could talk, too, that preacher!In language that was poetic without being sloppy he paid a tribute tothe spirit of fraternity that fairly lifted us out of our chairs. Everyman there was touched, I think--and deeply touched; no man who believedin the brotherhood of man, whether he practiced it or not, could havelistened unmoved to that speech. He spoke of the absent ones. Some ofthem he said had answered the last rollcall, and some were stretchedupon the bed of affliction, and some were unavoidably detained bybusiness in the East; and he intimated that those in the last categorywho had been away for as long as three weeks wouldn't know the old placewhen they got back!--Applause. 

This naturally brought him round to the subject of Los Angeles as a cityof business and homes. He pointed out its marvelous growth--quotingfreely from the latest issue of the city directory and other reliableauthorities to prove his figures; he made a few heartrousing predictionstouching on its future prospects, as tending to show that in a year orless San Francisco and other ambitious contenders along the Coast wouldbe eating at the second table; he peopled the land clear back to themountains with new homes and new neighbors; and he wound up, in a burstof vocal glory, with the most magnificent testimonial for the climate Iever heard any climate get. Did he move his audience then? Oh, butdidn't he move them, though! Along toward the close of the third minuteof uninterrupted cheering I thought the roof was gone. 

On the day after my arrival I made one very serious mistake; in fact, itcame near to being a fatal one. I met a lady, and naturally right awayshe asked me the customary opening question. Every conversation betweena stranger and a resident begins according to that formula. Still itseemed to me an inopportune hour for bringing up the subject. It wasearly in March and the day was one of those days which a greenhorn fromthe East might have been pardoned for regarding as verging upon thechilly--not to say the raw. Also, it seemed to be raining. I say itseemed to be raining, because no true Southern Californian would admitany actual defects in the climatic arrangements. If pressed he mightconcede that ostensibly an infinitesimal percentage of precipitation wasdescending, and that apparently the mercury had descended a notch or twoin the tube. Further than that, in the absence of the official reports, he would not care to commit himself. 

You never saw such touching loyalty anywhere! Those scoffing neighborsof Noah who kept denying on there was going to be any flood right up tothe moment when they went down for the third time were rank amateursalongside a seasoned resident of Los Angeles. I was newly arrived, however, and I hadn't acquired the ethics yet; and, besides, I hadcontracted a bad cold and had been taking a number of things for it andfor the moment was, as you might say, full of conflicting emulsions. So, in reply to this lady's question, I said it occurred to me that theprevalent atmospheric conditions might for the nonce stand a fewtrifling alterations without any permanent ill effects. 

I repeat that this was a mistake; for this particular lady was herself arecent arrival, and of all the incurable Californians, the new ones arethe most incurable. She gave me one look--but such a look! From areasonably solid person I became first a pulp and then a pap; and then, reversing the processes of creation as laid down in Genesis, firstchapter, and first to fifth verses, I liquefied and turned to gas, anddarkness covered me, and I became void and without form, and passed offin the form of a vapor, leaving my clothes inhabited only by a blushingand embarrassed emptiness. When the outraged lady abated the intensityof her scornful gaze and I painfully reassembled my astral body out ofspace and projected it back into my earthly tenement again, I found I'dshrunk so in these various processes that nothing I wore fitted me anylonger. 

I shall never commit that error again. I know better now. If I were acondemned criminal about to die on a gallows at the state penitentiary, I would make the customary announcement touching on my intention ofgoing straight to Heaven--condemned criminals never seem to have anydoubt on that point--and then in conclusion I would add that afterSouthern California, I knew I wouldn't care for the climate Up There. Then I would step serenely off into eternity, secure in the belief that, no matter how heinous my crime might have been, all the local paperswould give me nice obituary notices. 

I'd be absolutely sure of the papers, because the papers are the last toconcede that there ever was or ever will be a flaw in the climateanywhere. In a certain city out on the Coast there is one paper thatrefuses even to admit that a human being can actually expire whilebreathing the air of Southern California. It won't go so far as to saythat anybody has died--"passed away" is the term used. You read in itscolumns that Medulla Oblongata, the Mexican who was kicked in the headby a mule last Sunday afternoon, has passed away at the city hospital;or that, during yesterday's misunderstanding in Chinatown between theBing Bangs and the Ok Louies, two Tong men were shot and cut in such amanner that they practically passed away on the spot. When I was there Itraveled all one day over the route of an unprecedented cold snap thathad happened along a little earlier and mussed up the citrus groves;and, though I will not go so far as to say that the orange crop haddied or that it had been killed, it did look to me as though it hadpassed away to a considerable extent. 

This sort of visitation, however, doesn't occur often; in fact, it neverhad occurred before--and the chances are it never will occur again. Nextto taxes and the high cost of living, I judge the California climate tobe about the most dependable institution we have in this country--yes, and one of the most satisfactory, too. To its climate California isindebted for being the most extravagantly beautiful spot I've seen onthis continent. It isn't just beautiful in spots--it is beautiful allover; it isn't beautiful in a sedate, reserved way--there is a prodigal, riotous, abandoned spendthriftiness to its beauty. 

I don't know of anything more wonderful than an automobile ride throughone of the fruit valleys in the Mission country. In one day'stravel--or, at most, two--you can get a taste of all the things thatmake this farthermost corner of the United States at once so diversifiedand so individual--sky-piercing mountain and mirage-painted desert;seashore and upland; ranch lands, farm lands and fruit lands; city andtown; traces of our oldest civilization and stretches of our newest;wilderness and jungle and landscape garden; the pines of the snows, thefamiliar growths of the temperate zone, the palms of the tropics; andfinally--which is California's own--the Big Trees. All day you may rideand never once will your eye rest upon a picture that is commonplace ortrumpery. 

Going either North or South, your road lies between mountains. To theeastward, shutting out the deserts from this domain of everlastingsummer, are the Sierras--great saw-edged old he-mountains, masculine asbulls or bucks, all rugged and wrinkled, bearded with firs and pinesupon their jowls, but bald-headed and hoar with age atop like theProphets of old. But the mountains of the Coast Range, to the westward, are full-bosomed and maternal, mothering the valleys up to them; andtheir round-uddered, fecund slopes are covered with softest green. Onlywhen you come closer to them you see that the garments on their breastsare not silky-smooth as they looked at a distance, but shirred andgored, gathered and smocked. I suppose even a lady mountain never getstoo old to follow the fashions!

Now you pass an orchard big enough to make a hundred of your averageEastern orchards; and if it be of apples or plums or cherries, and thetime be springtime, it is all one vast white bridal bouquet; but if itbe of almonds or peaches the whole land, maybe for miles on end, blazeswith a pink flame that is the pinkest pink in the world--pinker than theheart of a ripe watermelon; pinker than the inside of a blond cow. 

Here is a meadowland of purest, deepest green; and flung across it, likea streak of sunshine playing hooky from Heaven, is a slash of wildyellow poppies. There, upon a hillside, stands a clump of gnarly, dwarfed olives, making you think of Bible times and the Old Testament. Or else it is a great range, where cattle by thousands feed upon theslopes. Or a crested ridge, upon which the gum trees stand up in longaisles, sorrowful and majestic as the funereal groves of the ancientGreeks--that is, provided it was the ancient Greeks who had the funerealgroves. 

Or, best of all and most striking in its contrasts, you will see a hillall green, with a nap on it like a family album; and right on the top ofit an old, crumbly gray mission, its cross gleaming against the skyline;and, down below, a modern town, with red roofs and hipped windows, itshouses buried to their eaves in palms and giant rose bushes, and hugeclimbing geraniums, and all manner of green tropical growths that areNature's own Christmas trees, with the red-and-yellow dingle-danglesgrowing upon them. Or perhaps it is a gorge choked with the enormousredwoods, each individual tree with a trunk like the WashingtonMonument. And, if you are only as lucky as we were, up overhead, acrossthe blue sky, will be drifting a hundred fleecy clouds, one behind theother, like woolly white sheep grazing upon the meadows of thefirmament. 

Everywhere the colors are splashed on with a barbaric, almost atheatrical, touch. It's a regular backdrop of a country; its scenerylooks as though it belonged on a stage--as though it should be paintedon a curtain. You almost expect to see a chorus of comic-opera brigandsor a bevy of stage milkmaids come trooping out of the wings any minute. Who was the libelous wretch who said that the flowers of California hadno perfume and the birds there had no song? Where we passed throughtangled woods the odors distilled from the wild flowers by the sun'swarmth were often almost suffocating in their sweetness; and in ayellow-tufted bush on the lawn at Coronado I came upon a mocking-birdsinging in a way to make his brother minstrel of Mobile or Savannah feellike applying for admission to a school of expression and learning thesinging business all over again. 

[Illustration: OUT FROM UNDER A ROCK SOMEWHERE WILL CRAWL A REAL ESTATEAGENT]

At the end of the valley--top end or bottom end as the case may be--youcome to a chain of lesser mountains, dropped down across your path likea trailing wing of the Indians' fabled thunder-bird, vainly trying toshut you out from the next valley. You climb the divide and run throughthe pass, with a brawling river upon one side and tall cliffs upon theother; and then all of a sudden the hills magically part and you arewithin sight--almost within touch--of the ocean; for in this favoredland the mountains come right down to the sea and the sea comes right upto the mountains. It may be upon a tiny bay that you have emerged, withthe meadows sloping straight to tidemark, and out beyond the wild fowlfeeding by the kelp beds. 

Or perhaps you have come out upon a ragged, rugged headland, crownedbelike with a single wind-twisted tree, grotesquely suggesting a frizzlychicken; and away below, straight and sheer, are the rocks rising out ofthe water like the jaws of a mangle. Down there in that ginlike reefNeptune is forever washing out his shirt in a smother of foamy lather. And he has spilled his bluing pot, too--else how could all the sea be soblue? On the outermost rocks the sea-lions have stretched themselves, looking like so many overgrown slugs; and they lie for hours and sunthemselves and bellow--or, at least, I am told they do so on occasion. There was unfortunately no bellowing going on the day I was there. 

The unearthly beauty of the whole thing overpowers you. The poet thatlives in nearly every human soul rouses within you and you feel likewithdrawing to yon dense grove or yon peaked promontory to commune withNature. But be advised in season. Restrain yourself! Carefully refrain!Do not do so! Because out from under a rock somewhere will crawl areal-estate agent to ask you how you like the climate and take a dollardown as first payment on a fruit ranch, or a suburban lot, or a seasidevilla--or something. 

Climate did it and he can prove it. Only he doesn't have to proveit--you admit it. I had never seen the Mediterranean when I went West;but I saw the cypresses of Del Monte, and the redwood grove in the cañonjust below Harry Leon Wilson's place, down past Carmel-by-the-Sea; andthat was sufficient. I had no burning yearning to see Naples and die, asthe poet suggested. I felt that I would rather see Monterey Bay again ona bright March day and live!

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

Both externally and internally the majority of these hotels aresingularly alike. Mainly they are rambling frame structures done in amodified Spanish architecture--late Spanish crossed on EarlyPeoria--with a lobby so large that, loafing there, you feel as thoughyou were in the waiting-room of the Grand Central Terminal, and with adining room about the size of the state of Rhode Island, and a sunparlor that has windows all round, so as to give its occupants theaspect, when viewed from without, of being inmates of an aquarium; and agorgeous tea room done in the style of one of the French Louies--Louiethe Limit, I guess. There are some notable exceptions to the rule--someof the places have pleasing individualities of their own, but most ofthem were cut off the same pattern. Likewise the bulk of their winterpatrons are cut off the same pattern. 

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

These people constitute one breed of Eastern tourists. There is theother breed, who are willing to see America provided it is made over toconform with the accepted Eastern model. Those who can afford theexpense go to Florida in the winter; but it requires at least a millionin small change to feel at home in that setting, and so a good many whohaven't quite a million to spare, head for Southern California as thenext best spot on the map. Arriving there, they endeavor to reproduce onas exact a scale as possible the life of the ultra fashionable Floridaresorts; the result is what a burlesque manager would call a Number TwoPalm 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 inthe 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 growsmaddening; and always they are intently following the routine you sawthem following last week or the week before, or the week before that. They have traveled clear across the continent to practice suchdiversions as they might have had within two hours' ride of Philadelphiaor New York; and they are going to practice them, too, or know thereason why. 

Of course they are not all constituted this way; I am speaking now ofthe impression created in California by tourists in bulk. They declineto do the things for which this country is best adapted; they will notsee the things for which it is most famous. Few of them take theroughing trips up into the mountains; fewer still visit the desertcountry. All about them the tremendous engineering contracts that havemade this land a commercial Arabian Nights' Entertainment are beingcarried out--the mighty reclamation schemes; the irrigation projects;the damming up of cañons and the shoveling away of mountains--but youraverage group of Eastern tourists pass these by with dull and glazedeyes, their souls being bound up in the desire to reach the next hotelon the route with the least possible waste of time, and take up theroutine where it was broken off at the last hotel. 

They tennis and they golf, and some go horseback riding and some takedrives; 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 theday; and in the evening all hands appear in full dress for dinner, thesame being very wearing on men and very pleasing to women--that is, allof them do except a few obstinate persons who defy convention and remaincomfortable. After dinner some of the younger people dance and some ofthe older ones play bridge; but the vast majority sit round--and thensit round some more and wonder whether eleven o'clock will ever come sothey can go to bed!

A good many take the wrong kind of clothes out there with them. Theyhave read in the advertisements that Southern California is a land ofperpetual balm, where flowers bloom the year round; and they pack theirtrunks with the lightest and thinnest wearing apparel they own, which isa mistake. The natives know better than that. The all-wool sweater isthe national garment of the Western Coast--both sexes and all ages go toit unanimously. Experience proves it the ideal thing to wear; for inSouthern California in the winter it is never really hot in the sun andit is often exceedingly cool in the shade. Besides, there is a sea windthat blows pretty regularly and which makes a specialty of workingthrough the crannies in a silk shirt or a lingerie blouse. Thechilliest, most pallid-looking things I ever saw in my life were a pairof white linen trousers I found in the top tray of my trunk when Ireached the extreme lower end of California. I had to cover them undertwo blankets and a bedspread that night to keep the poor things fromfreezing stiff. 

The medium-weight garments an Easterner wears between seasons areadmirably suited for the West Coast in the winter; but the guilelesstenderfoot who is making his first trip to California usually doesn'tlearn this until it is too late. If he is wise he studies out thesituation on his arrival, and thereafter takes his overcoat with himwhen he goes riding and his sweater when he goes walking; but there aremany others who will be summer boys and girls though they perish in theattempt. 

At Coronado I witnessed a mighty pitiable sight. It was a cool day, cooler than ordinary even, with a stiff wind blowing skeiny shreds ofsea fog in off the gray ocean; and a beating rain was falling atfrequent intervals. The veranda was full of Easterners trying to lookcomfortable in summer clothes and not succeeding, while the road infront was dotted with Westerners, comfortable and cozy in their thicksweaters. There emerged upon the wind-swept porch a youth who would havebeen a sartorial credit to himself on a Florida beach in February orupon a Jersey board-walk in August; but he did not coincide with theatmospheric scheme of things on a rainy March day down in SouthernCalifornia. 

[Illustration: HE FELT HE WAS PROPERLY DRESSED FOR THE TIME, THE PLACEAND THE OCCASION]

To begin with, he was a spindly and fragile person, with a knobbyforehead and a fade-away face. Dressed in close-fitting black and turnedsidewise, with his profile to you, he would instantly suggest a neatlyrolled umbrella with a plain bone handle. But he was not dressed inblack; he was dressed in white--all white, like a bride or a bandagedthumb; white silk shirt; white flannel coat, with white pearl buttonsspangled 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 eraseron it I'm satisfied I could have backed him up against the wall andrubbed him right out; but he bore up splendidly. 

It was plain he felt that he was properly dressed for the time, theplace and the occasion; and to him that was ample compensation for hissuffering. I heard afterward that he lost three sets of tennis and had acongestive chill--all in the course of the same afternoon. 

The unconquerable determination of the Eastern tourist to have SouthernCalifornia conform to his back-home standards is responsible for thefact that many of the tourist hotels out there are not so typical of theWest as they might be--and as in my humble judgment they should be--butare as Eastern as it is possible to make them--Eastern in cuisine, incharges and in their operating schedules. Here, again, there are somenotable exceptions. 

In the supposedly wilder sections of the West, lying between the Rockiesand the Sierras, the situation is different. It is notably different inArizona and New Mexico in the South, and in Utah, Montana and Wyomingin the North. There the person who serves you for hire is neither yourmenial nor your superior; whereas in the East he or she is nearly alwaysone or the other, and sometimes both at once. This particular type ofWesterner doesn't patronize you; neither does he cringe to you inexpectation of a tip. He gives you the best he has in stock, meanwhileretaining his own self-respect and expecting you to do the same. Heennobles and dignifies personal service. 

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

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

A hat would have been more. 

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

A lot has been said and written about the marvelous palms of LowerCalifornia and a lot more might be said--for they are outstretchedeverywhere; and if you don't cross them with silver at frequentintervals you would do well to try camping out for a change. Likewise acursory glance at the prices on some of the menus is calculated to makea New Yorker homesick--they're so familiarly and unreasonably steep. Andfrequently the dishes you get aren't typical of the country; theyare--thanks again be to the Easterner--mostly transplanted imitations ofthe concoctions of the Broadway and the Fifth Avenue chefs. 

There are compensations, though. There are some hotels that are operatedon admirably different lines, and there are abundant opportunities forescaping altogether from hotel life and seeing this Land of the LivingBackdrop where it is untainted and unspoiled; where the hills areclothed in green and yellow; where little Spanishy looking towns nestlebelow the Missions, and the mocking-birds sing, and the real-estateboomer leaps from crag to crag, sounding his flute-like note. And don'tforget the climate! But that is unnecessary advice. You won't have achance to forget it--not for a minute you won't!

_IN THE HAUNT OF THE NATIVE SON_

[Illustration]

_In the Haunt of the Native Son_

THERE are various ways of entering San Francisco, and the travelinggeneral passenger agent of any one of half a dozen trunklines standsready to prove to you--absolutely beyond the peradventure of adoubt--that his particular way is incomparably the best one; but to mymind a very satisfactory way is to go overland from Monterey. 

The route we followed led us lengthwise through the wonderful SantaClara country, straight up a wide box plait of valley tucked in betweenan ornamental double ruffle of mountains. I suppose if we passed oneranch 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 youhave reference may be a ten-thousand-acre ranch, where they raise enoughbeef 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 eighthens and a rooster; but a ranch it always is, and usually it is a modelof its kind, too. The birds in California do not build nests. They buildranches. 

Most of the way along the Santa Clara Valley our tires glided upon anarrow-straight, unbelievably smooth stretch of magnificent automobileroad, which--when it is completed--will extend without a break from theOregon line to the Mexican line, and will be the finest, costliest, bestthoroughfare to be found within the boundaries of any state of theUnion, that being the scale upon which they work out theirpublic-utility plans in the West. 

Eventually the road changes into a paved and curbed avenue, lined withseemingly unending aisles of the tall gum trees. Soon you begin toskitter past the suburban villas of rich men, set back in ornamentallandscape effects of green lawns and among tropical verdure. You emergefrom this into a gently rolling plateau, upon which flower gardens ofincomparable richness are interspersed with the homely structures thatinevitably mark the proximity of any great city. There, rising ahead ofyou, are the foothills that protect, upon its landward side, SanFrancisco, the city that has produced more artists, more poets, morewriters, more actors, more pugilists, more sudden millionaires--cries ofQuestion! Question! from the Pittsburgh delegation--more good fictionand more Native Sons than any community in the Western Hemisphere. 

You aren't there yet, however. Next you round a sloping shoulder of ahill and slide down into a shore road, with the beating, creaming surfon one side, and on the other a long succession of the sort ofarchitectural triumphs that have made Coney Island famous. You negotiateanother small ridge and there, suddenly spread out before you, is theGolden Gate, with the city itself cuddled in between the ocean and thefriendly protecting mountains at its back. The Seal Rocks are there, andthe Cliff House, and the Presidio, and all. New York has a wonderfulharbor entrance; Nature did some of it and man did the rest. SanFrancisco has an even more wonderful one, and the hand of man did notneed to touch it. When Nature got through with it, it was a complete andsatisfactory job. 

The first convincing impression the newcomer gets of San Francisco isthat here is a permanent city--a city that has found itself, hasachieved its own personality, and is satisfied with it. Perhaps, becausethey are growing so fast, certain of the other Coast cities strike thecasual observer as having just been put up. I was told that a man wholives on a residential street of San Diego has to mark his house withchalk when he leaves of a morning in order to know it when he gets homeat night. A real-estate agent told me so, and I do not think a SouthernCalifornia real-estate agent would deceive anybody--more particularly astranger from the East. So it must be true. And Los Angeles' mainbusiness district is like a transverse slice chopped out of the middleof Manhattan Island. It isn't Western. It is typically New Yorky--asalive as New York and as handsomely done. You can almost imagine you areat the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. 

San Francisco, it seems to me, isn't like any city on earth except SanFrancisco. Once you get away from the larger hotels, which are accuratecopies of the metropolitan article of the East, even to the afternoontea-fighting mêlées of the women, you find yourself in a city that isabsolutely individual and distinctive. It impresses its originality uponyou; it presents itself with an air of having been right there from thebeginning--and this, too, in spite of the fact that the ravages of thegreat fire are still visible in old cellar excavations and piles ofdébris. Practically every building in the main part of the town hasbeen 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 andthe conversations of the people. They do not strike you as beingWesterners or as being transplanted Easterners; they are SanFranciscans. Even when all other signs fail you may, nevertheless, instantly discern certain unfailing traits--to wit, as follows: 1--A SanFranciscan shudders with ill-concealed horror when anybody refers to hisbeloved city as Frisco--which nobody ever does unless it be a raw alienfrom the other side of the continent; 2--He does not brag of the climatewith that constancy which provides his neighbor of Los Angeles anever-failing topic of congenial conversation; and 3--He assures youwith a regretful sighing note in his voice that the old-time romancedisappeared with the destruction of the old-time buildings, the old-timeresorts and the old-time neighborhoods. 

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

No doubt our children and our children's children will read in thetext-books that the first decade of the twentieth century wasdistinguished as the age when the auto and tango came into use, andpeople learned to fly, and grown men wore bracelet watches and carriedtheir handkerchiefs up their cuffs; and they will repine because they, too, did not live in those stirring times. But we of the presentgeneration who recently passed through these experiences have alreadyaccepted them without undue excitement, just as our forefathers in theirday accepted the submarine cable, the galvanic battery and the congressgaiter. 

[Illustration: EVEN THE PLACE WHERE THE TURKEY TROT ORIGINATED WASTROTLESS AND QUIET]

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

So, when I was repeatedly assured that the old-time romance had vanishedfrom San Francisco, and with it the atmosphere that bred Bohemianism anddeveloped literature and art, and kept alive the spirit of theForty-niner times, and all that, I made my own allowances. Those whomourned 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 SanFrancisco, though infinitely larger, isn't so picturesque really or soChinesey looking as New York's Chinatown. 

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

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

The so-called French restaurants, which for years gave an unwholesomesavor to certain phases of San Francisco life, had likewise beensterilized and purified. I wished I might have got there before thehousecleaning took place; but, even so, I should probably have beendisappointed. What makes the vice of ancient Babylon seem by contrastmore seductive to us than the vice of the Bowery is that Babylon is goneand the Bowery isn't. 

Likewise the night life of San Francisco, of which in times past I hadread so much, was disillusionizing, because it wasn't visible to thenaked eye. On this proposition Los Angeles puts it all over SanFrancisco; for this, though, there is an easy explanation. Los Angelesboasts what is said to be the completest trolley system in the world;undoubtedly it is the noisiest in the world. The tracks seem to runthrough every street; there is a curve at every corner, I think, and aswitch in the middle of every block. Every thirty seconds or so a carcomes along, and it always comes at top speed and takes the curvewithout slackening up; and the motorman is always clanging his gong in awhole-souled manner that would entitle him to membership in the SwissBellringers. 

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

The old romance of the Old San Francisco may be dead and buried--theresidents unite in saying that it is, and they ought to know; but, evenso, New San Francisco may well brag today of a greater romance than anyit ever knew--the romance of achievement. Somebody said not long agothat the greatest of all monuments to American pluck was San Franciscorebuilt; but if there was pluck in it there was romance too. And thereis romance, plenty of it, in the exposition these people have plannedand are now carrying out to commemorate the opening of the PanamaCanal. 

To begin with, citizens of San Francisco and of the state of Californiaare paying the whole bill themselves--they did not ask the FederalGovernment to contribute a red cent of the millions being spent and thatwill be spent, and to date the Federal Government has not contributed ared cent either. Climatic conditions are in their favor. Otherexpositions have had to contend with hot weather--sometimes with beastlyhot weather; those other expositions could not open up until well intothe spring, and they closed perforce with the coming of cold weather inthe fall. But San Francisco is never very hot and never really cold, andCalifornia becomes an out-of-door land as soon as the rains end; so thisfair will be actively and continuously in operation for nine monthsinstead of being limited to four or five months as the period of itsgreatest activities. 

Then, again, there is another advantage--the exposition grounds aresituated well within the city; the site is within easy riding distanceof the civic center and not miles away from the middle of town, as hasbeen the case in certain other instances in this country where bigexpositions were held. It is a place admirably devised by Nature for thepurposes to which it is now being put--a six-hundred-acre tractstretching along the water-front, with the Presidio at its farther end, the high hills behind it, and in front of it the exquisite panorama ofthe Golden Gate, with emerald islands rising beyond; and Berkeley andOakland just across the way; and on beyond, northward across thenarrowing 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 thatthe whole thing, down to the minutest detail, would be completed andready months before the date set for opening the gates--which furnishesanother 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 thiscountry 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 sufficientlyinspiring 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 aregoing to have their hands full when the exposition visitors begin topile in. By that I do not mean that the housing and feedingaccommodations and the transit facilities will be deficient; but it isgoing to be a most overpoweringly big job to educate the pilgrims up tothe point where they will call San Francisco by its full name. All trueSan Franciscans are very touchy on this point--touchy as hedgehogs, theyare; the prejudice extends to all classes, with the possible exceptionof the Chinese. 

I heard a story of a seafaring person, ignorant and newly arrived, whodrifted into a waterfront saloon, called for a simple glass of beer andspoke a few casual words of greeting to the barkeeper--and woke up thenext morning in the hospital with a very bad headache and a bandageround his throbbing brows. It developed that he had three times in rapidsuccession referred to the city as Frisco, and on being warned againstthis 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 felledhim as flat as a felled seam--and all present agreed that it served himright. 

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

If I were in charge of the publicity work of the San Francisco Fair Ishould advertise two attractions that would surely appeal to all thewomen in this country, and to most of the men. In my press work I woulddwell at length upon the fact that in this part of California a womanmay wear any weight and any style of clothes--spring clothes, summerclothes, fall clothes or winter clothes--and not only be perfectlycomfortable while so doing, but be in the fashion besides; and to be inthe fashion is a thing calculated to make a woman comfortable whethershe otherwise is or not. 

To see a group of four women promenading a San Francisco street on apleasant morning is to be reminded of that ballet representing the FourSeasons, which we used to see in the second act of every well-regulatedextravaganza. The woman nearest the walls has on her furs--it is alwayscool in the shade; the one next to her is wearing the very latestwrinkles in spring garniture; the third one, let us say, is dressed inthe especially becoming frock she bought last October; and the one onthe outside, where the sun shines the brightest, is as summery in herwhite ducks and her white slippers as though she had just stepped offthe cover of the August number of a magazine. There is something, too, about the salt-laden breezes of San Francisco that gives women wonderfulcomplexions; that detail, properly press-agented, ought to fetch theentire female population of the United States. 

[Illustration: THE WOMAN NEAREST THE WALL HAS ON HER FURS--IT IS ALWAYSCOOL IN THE SHADE]

For drawing the men, I would exploit the great cardinal fact thatnowhere in the country--not even in Norfolk or Baltimore or NewOrleans--can you get better things to eat than in San Francisco. For itssize, I believe there are more good clubs and more good restaurantsright there than in any other spot on the habitable globe. Particularlyin the preparation of the typical dishes of the Coast do the SanFrancisco cooks excel; their cuisine is based on a sane Americanfoundation, with a delectable suggestion of the Spanish in it, andsometimes with a traceable suggestion of the best there is in theItalian and the Chinese schools of cookery. 

To one whose taste in oysters has been developed by eating thefull-chested bi-valve of the Eastern seaboard and the deep-lunged, long-bodied product of the Louisiana bayous, the native oyster does notgreatly appeal. A lot has been written and printed about the Californiaoyster, but in my opinion he will always have considerable difficulty inliving up to his press notices. It takes about a thousand of him to makea quart and about a hundred of him to make a taste. Even then he doesn'ttaste much like a real oyster, but more like an infinitesimal scrap ofsponge where a real oyster camped out overnight once. 

There is a dream of a little fish, however, called a sand dab--he is atiny, flounder-shaped titbit hailing from deep water; and for eatingpurposes he is probably the best fish that swims--better even than thepompano of the Gulf--and when you say that you are saying about allthere is to be said for a fish. And the big crabs of the Pacific sideare the hereditary princes of the crab family. They look likespread-eagles; and properly prepared they taste like Heaven. I oftenwonder what the crabsters buy one-half so precious as the stuff theysell--which is a quotation from Omar, with original interpolations byme. The domestic cheese of the Sierras is not without its attractionsalso, whether you eat it fresh or whether you keep it until its generalaspect and prevalent atmosphere are such as to satisfy even one of thoseepicurean cheese-eaters who think that no cheese is fit to eat until youcan't. 

Another thing worthy of mention in connection with this Californiaschool of cookery is that you can pay as little as you please for yourdinner or as much as you please. There are three standbys of theexchange editor that may be counted upon to appear in the newspapersabout once in so often. One is the hoary-headed and toothless taleregarding the artist who was hired to renovate religious paintings in achurch in Brussels, and turned in an itemized account including suchentries as--"Correcting the Ten Commandments"; "Restoring the LostSouls"; "Renewing Heaven"; and winding up with "Doing Several Odd Jobsfor the Damned. "

The second of the set comes out of retirement at frequentintervals--whenever some trusting soul runs across a time-stained numberof the Ulster Gazette giving details of the death of GeorgeWashington--I wonder how many million copies of that venerablecounterfeit were printed--and writes in to his home editor about it. 

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

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

I append herewith a few items selected at random from the price card ofa fashionable establishment in one of the larger Coast cities: caviarimpérial d'Astracan, two dollars for a double portion; buffetRusse--whatever that is--ninety cents; German asparagus, a singlehelping, 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 foran order of spiced figs. Even seasoned New Yorkers have been known tobreathe hard on receiving a check for a full meal at certain restaurantsin Los Angeles and San Francisco. 

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

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

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

If this seeming officiousness on the part of a passing wayfarer may beexcused there is one more suggestion I should like to throw off for thebenefit of the promoters of the exposition. Living somewhere inCalifornia 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 suitablequarters as a special and added attraction. He is the most magnificentfish-liar in the known world! I do not know his name--he was so busypouring fish stories down a party of us that he didn't take time to stopand tell his name--but no great difficulty should be experienced infinding him. There is only one of him alive--these world's wonders neveroccur in pairs. That would cheapen them and make them commonplace. 

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

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

"Speaking of fishing, " said the button-nosed man, "I'll tell you peoplesomething that'll maybe interest you. You may not believe it, either, mebeing a stranger to you; but it's the Gospel truth or I wouldn't besitting here a-telling it. I reckon I've done more fishing in my day andmore different kinds of fishing than any man alive. I come originallyfrom a prime fishing state--Michigan--and I've lived in Colorado andMontana 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 'emall--she takes the rag right off the bush! I'm the one that oughter knowbecause 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 manthat ketched the biggest tuna that ever come out of that ocean. It tookme fourteen hours and forty-five minutes to land him, and during thattime he towed me and an eighteen-foot boat, and the fellow I had alongfor boatman, over forty-four miles--I measured it afterward to besure--and the friction of the reel spinning round wore my line down tillit wasn't no thicker in places than a cobweb. But tunas ain't my regularspecialty--trouts and basses are my special favorites; and up in themountains is where I mostly do my fishing. 

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

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

We looked at one another silently. A total of seventy-two five-poundbass in three-quarters of an hour seemed a little too much to be takenas a first dose from a strange practitioner. And it was hard to believethey had all been basses; if only for the sake of variety there shouldhave been at least one barytone. We felt that we needed time forreflection--and digestion. 

Evidently realizing this, one of our number undertook to throw himselfinto the breach. As I recollect, this volunteer was the fat coffindrummer 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. Ithink he wore the bow there purposely--it simplified matters so when youwere trying to decide which side of his head his face grew on. He heaveda pensive sigh out of his system and remarked upon the clearness of theair in these parts. 

"You're right there, mister, " broke in the button-nosed man, snappinghim up instantly. "The air is tolerable clear here today; but yououghter to see the air up in the mountains! Why, it's so clear up thereit would make this here hill-country air look like a fog. I rememberoncet I was browsing along a cliff up in that country, toting myfishpole, and I happened to look over the bluff--just so--and down belowI saw a hole in the creek that was just crawling with them bigtrouts--steel-head trouts and rainbow trouts. I could see the spots ontheir 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 andthe water would natchelly be tolerable deep; so I let all my line runoff the reel, a hundred and sixty feet of it; and I fished and fishedand fished--and didn't get a strike, let alone a nibble. Yet I couldlook over and see all these hungry trouts down below looking up withexpectant looks in their eyes--I could see their eyes--and jumping roundregardless; and yet not a bite! So I changed bait--changed from livebait to dead bait, and back again to live--and still there wasn'tnothing doing. So I says to myself: 'Something's wrong, sure! Thisthing'll stand looking into. '

[Illustration: IT'S A GREAT THING OUT THERE TO BE A NATIVE SON]

"So I snoops round and finds a place where there's a sort of a slopingplace 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 thereclear air that had fooled me! It was three hundred feet if it was aninch down from the top of that there bluff to the creek, and the holewas fully a hundred feet deep--maybe more; and away down at the plumbbottom all them trouts was congregated in a circlelike, looking upmighty greedy and longing at my bait, which was a live frog, danglingtwo hundred and forty-odd feet up in the air. But, speaking of clearair, that wasn't nothing at all compared to some other things I couldtell you about. Another time----"

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

I almost forgot to mention San Francisco's chief product--Native Sons. ANative Son is one who has acquired special merit by being born in thestate. 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 greatthing out there to be a Native Son. It counts in politics, and insociety, and at the clubs. 

And, after that, the next best thing is to be a Southerner, either bybirth or descent. People who have Southern blood in their veins arevery proud of it and can join a club on the strength of it; and some ofthem do a lot of talking about it. The definition is ratherelastic--anybody whose ancestors worked on the Southern Pacific iseligible, I think. 

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

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

_LOOKING FOR LO_

[Illustration]

_Looking for Lo_

IF it is your desire to observe the Red Indian of the Plains engaged inhis tribal sports and pastimes wait for the Wild West Show; there issure to be one coming to your town before the season is over. Or if youare bloodthirsty by nature and yearn to see him prancing round upon thewarpath, destroying the hated paleface and strewing the soil with hisshredded fragments, restrain your longings until next fall and thenarrange to take in the football game between Carlisle and Princeton. But, whatever you do, do not go journeying into the Far West in the hopeof finding him in great number upon his native heath, for the chancesare that you won't find him there in great number; and if you do he willprobably be a considerable disappointment to you; because, unless he ispaid 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 myitinerary did not include those states. I did not see a liveIndian--that is to say, a live Indian recognizable as such--in Nevada orin Colorado or in Utah, or in a four-hour run across one corner ofWyoming. 

In upward of a thousand miles of travel through California I saw justone 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 ofoveralls and a straw hat in an advanced state of decrepitude, and he wasworking in a truckpatch; if a native had not told me what he was I wouldhave passed him by for a sunburnt hired hand. 

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

Mind you, I'm not saying there are not plenty of Indians in thosestates; but they mostly stay on their reservations and the reservationsunfortunately are not, as a rule, near the railroad stations. A travelergoing through the average small Southern town sees practically theentire strength of the colored citizenry gathered at the depot and jumpsat the conclusion that the population is from ninety to ninety-five percent. Black. In the West he sees maybe one little Indian settlement in astretch of five or six hundred miles, and he figures that the Indian ispractically an extinct species. 

Of course, though, he is not extinct. In these piping commercial days ofacute competition he has no time to be gallivanting down to the depotevery time a through train rolls in, especially as the depot isfrequently eighty or ninety miles distant from his domicile. He isclosely confined at home turning out souvenirs. It is a pity, too, thathe cannot spare more of his time for this simple and inexpensivepleasure. In one week's study of the passing tourist breed he could seeenough funny sights and hear enough funny things--unintentionally funnythings--to keep his family entertained on many a long winter's eveningas they sit peacefully in the wigwam making knickknacks for the Easterntrade. 

[Illustration: EACH NAVAJO SQUAW WEAVES ON AN AVERAGE NINE THOUSANDBLANKETS A YEAR]

No, sirree! Those Southwestern tribes are far from beingextinct--especially the Navajos. You can, in a way, approximate thetribal strength of the Navajos by the number of Navajo blankets you see. From Colorado to the Coast the Navajo blanket carpets the earth. I'llbet any amount within reason that in six weeks' time I saw ten millionNavajo blankets if I saw one. As for other things--bows and arrows, forexample--well, I do not wish to exaggerate; but had I bought all thewooden bows and arrows that were offered to me I could take them andbuild a rustic footbridge across the Delaware River at Trenton, with aneat handrail all the way over. Taking the figures of the last census asa working basis I calculate that each Navajo squaw weaves, on anaverage, nine thousand blankets a year; and while she is so engaged herhusband, the metal worker of the establishment, is producing a couple oftons of silver bracelets set with turquoises. For prolixity of output Iknow of no female in the entire animal kingdom that can compare with theNavajo squaw--unless it is the lady Potomac shad. 

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

As we were bidding farewell to our family before starting West, our wifesaid to us in firm, decided accents: "I have already picked out a placewhere we can hide the Cheyenne war-bonnet. We can get rid of themoccasins and the stone hatchets and the beadwork breastplates bystoring them in a trunk up in the attic. But do not bring a Navajoblanket back to this already crowded establishment!" So we restrainedourselves. But it was a hard struggle and took a heroic effort. 

I recall one blanket, done in gray and black and red and white, anddecorated with the figures of the Thunder Bird and the Swastika, theRising Sun and the Jig Saw, and other Indian signs, symbols and emblems. It was with the utmost difficulty that I wrenched myself away from thevicinity of this treasure. And then, when I got back home, feeling proudas Punch over having withstood temptation in all its forms, almost thefirst 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'vealways wanted one!" Wasn't that just like a woman?

Though I refrained from seeking bargains in the blankets of theaborigine, I sought diligently enough for the aborigine himself. I hadmy first glimpse of him in Northern New Mexico just after we had comedown out of Colorado. Accompanied by his lady, he was languidly reposingon the platform in front of a depot, with his wares tastefully arrangedat his feet. As a concession to the acquired ideals of the Easternvisitor he had a red sofa tidy draped round his shoulders, and there wasa tired-looking hen-feather caught negligently in his back hair; and hissquaw displayed ornamented leggings below the hems of her simple calicowalking skirt. But these adornments, I gathered, constituted the callingcostume, so to speak. 

When at home in his village the universal garment of the Pueblo male isthe black sateen shirt of commerce. He puts it on and wears it until itis taken up by absorption, and then it is time to put on another. Theseshirts do not require washing; but, among the best Pueblo families, Iunderstand 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 theNavajo--delegations from both of these tribes having been imported fromthe reservations to give an added touch of picturesqueness to theprincipal hotel of the Grand Cañon. The Hopi, who excels at snakedancing and pottery work, is a mannerly little chap; and his daughter, with her hair done up in elaborate whorl effects in fancied imitation ofthe squash blossom--the squash being the Hopi emblem of purity--is adecidedly attractive feature of the landscape. 

The Hopi women are industrious little bodies, clever at basketweaving--and the men work, too, when not engaged in attending lodge; forthe Hopis are the ritualists of the Southwest, and every Hopi is aconfirmed joiner. Their secret societies exist to-day, uncorrupted andunchanged, just as they have survived for hundreds and perhaps thousandsof years. In the Hopi House at Grand Cañon there is a reproduction of akiva or underground temple. It isn't underground--it is locatedupstairs; but in all other regards it is supposed to conform exactly toone of the real ceremonial chambers of the Hopis. The dried-mud wallsare covered thickly with symbolic devices, painted on; and there is analtar tricked out with totems of the Powamu clan, one of the biggest ofthese societies. 

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

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

Two years ago this summer, a party of Mystic Shriners on an excursionvisited the cañon. Mr. Smith chaperoned one group of them on their tourthrough the Hopi House. In the sand painting of the kiva they seemed tofind something that particularly interested them. They put their headstogether, talking in undertones and pointing--so Smith said--first atone design and then at another. An old Hopi buck, a priest of theAntelope clan, was lounging in the low doorway watching them. What theShriners said to one another could have had no significance for him, even admitting that he heard them, for he did not understand a word ofEnglish; but suddenly he reached forth a withered hand and plucked Smithby the sleeve. I am letting Smith tell the rest of the tale just as hetold it to us:

"The Hopi pointed to one of the Shriners, an elderly man who came, Ithink, 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 andnever until to-day saw a Hopi in his whole life!' The medicine manshowed more excitement than I ever saw an Indian show. 

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

"As the Shriners were passing out I halted the white-haired man and saidto him: 'The Hopi medicine man insists that you are a Hopi and that youknow something about his clan. ' 'Well, ' he said, 'I'm no Hopi; but Ithink 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; hewalked right over to him and motioned to him, and the Hopi got up andthey went into the kiva together. I do not know what passed betweenthem--certainly no words passed--but in about ten minutes the Shrinercame out, and he had a puzzled look on his face. 

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

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

The Navajos are the aristocrats of the Southwestern country. They aredignified, cleanly in their personal habits, and orderly; and they arewonderful artisans. In addition to being wonderful weavers and excellentsilversmiths, they shine at agriculture and at stock raising and sheepraising. They are born horse-traders, too, and at driving a bargain itis said a buck Navajo can spot a Scotchman five balls any time and beathim out; but they have the name of being absolutely honest andabsolutely truthful. 

This same Mr. Smith, who has lived several years on the Navajoreservation and who is an adopted member of the tribe, took several ofus to pay a formal call upon a Navajo subchief, who spends the touristseason at the Grand Cañon. The old chap, long-haired and the color of aprime smoke-cured ham, received us with perfect courtesy into his winterresidence, the same being a circular hut contrived by overlappingtimbers together in a kind of basket design and then coating the logsinside and out with adobe clay. 

The place was clean and free from all unpleasant odors. In the middle ofthe 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 workedin metals; and against the far wall his squaw was hunkered down, weaving a blanket on her wooden loom. A couple of his young offspringwere playing about, dressed simply in their little negligee-strings. Themud walls were hung with completed blankets. Long, stringy strips ofdried beef and mutton--the national dishes of the tribe--were danglingfrom cross-pieces overhead; and on a rug upon the earthen floor lay aglittering pile of bracelets and brooches that had been made by the oldman out of Mexican dollars. When we came away, after spending fifteenminutes or so as their guests, the whole family came with us; but theold man tarried a minute to fasten a small brass padlock through a haspupon his wattled wooden door. 

"Up on the reservation, away from the railroads and the towns, there areno 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 cluckedback briefly, meanwhile eyeing me with a whimsical squint out of hispuckered old eyes. And then Smith translated:

"Why should we lock our doors in the place where we live? There are nowhite men there!"

I will confess that as a representative of the dominant Caucasian stockI had, for the moment, no apt reply ready. Later I thought of a veryfitting retort, which undoubtedly would have flattened that impertinentIndian as flat as a flounder; unfortunately, though, it only came to meafter several days of study, and by that time I was upward of a thousandmiles away from him. But I am saving it to use on him the next time I goback to the Grand Cañon. No mere Indian can slander our race, even if heis telling the truth--not while I'm around!

Down in Southern California I rather figured on finding a large swarm ofMission Indians clustering about every Mission; but, alas! they weren'tthere, either. We saw a few worshipers and plenty of tourists, but noIndians--at least, I didn't see any personally. There is somethingwonderfully impressive about a first trip to any one of those old graychurches; everything about it is eloquent with memories of that oldercivilization which this Western country knew long before the Celt andthe Anglo-Saxon breeds came over the Divide and down the Pacific Slope, filled with their lust for gold and lands, craving ever more power andmore territory over which to float the Stars and Stripes. 

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

[Illustration: AS SHE LEVELED THE LENS A YELL WENT UP FROM SOMEWHERE]

There is one Mission which in itself, it seemed to me, is almost worth atrip clear across the continent to see--the one at Santa Barbara. It isup the side of a gentle foothill, with the mountains of the Coast Rangebehind it. Down below the roofs and spires of a brisk little cityshow through green clumpage, and still farther beyond the blue waters ofthe Pacific may be seen. 

Parts of this Mission are comparatively new; there are retouchings andrestorations that date back only sixty or seventy years, but most of itspeaks to you of an earlier century than this and an earlier race thanthe one that now peoples the land. You pass through walls of solidmasonry that are sixteen feet thick and pierced by narrow passages; youclimb 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-rivenbeams; you walk through the Mission burying-ground, past crumbly oldfamily vaults with half-obliterated names and titles and dates upontheir ovenlike fronts, and you wander at will among the sunkenindividual graves under the palms and pepper trees. 

Most convincing of all to me were the stone-flagged steps at the door ofthe church itself, for they are all worn down like the teeth of an oldhorse--in places they are almost worn in two. Better than any guidebookpatter of facts and figures--better than the bells and the graves andthe 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 vanishedgenerations--the heavy boot of the conquistador; the sandaled foot ofthe 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 outof stone and mortar--each of them wearing away its infinitesimalmite--until through years and years the firm stone was scored away andchanneled 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 couldpeople that spot with the dead-and-gone figures of that shadowy past;could forget the trolley cars curving right up to the walls; theelectric lights strung in globular festoons along the ancient ceilingsof the porticoes; the roofs of the new, shiny modern bungalows dottingthe gentle slopes below--could forget even that the brown-cowled, rope-girthed father who served as guide spoke with a strong Germanaccent; could almost forgive the impious driver of the rig that broughtone here for referring to this place as the Mish. But be sure therewould be one thing to bring you hurtling back again to earth, no matterhow far aloft your fancy soared--and that would be the ever-presentsouvenir-collecting tourist, to whom no shrine is holy and no memory issacred. 

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

There is a kind of traveler who repays this hospitality by defiling thewalls with his inconsequential name, scratched in or scrawled on, and bytoting away as a souvenir whatever portable object he can confiscatewhen nobody is looking. Up in the bell tower the masonry is all defacedand pocked where these vandals have dug at it with pocketknives; and aswe were coming away, one of them--a typical specimen--showed me withdeep pride half of a brick pouched in his coat pocket. It seemed thatwhile the priest's back was turned he had pried it loose from thefrilled ornamentation of a vault in the burying-ground at the cost onlyof his self-respect--admitting that he had any of that commodity instock--and a broken thumbnail. It was, indeed, a priceless treasure andhe valued it accordingly. And yet, at a distance of ten feet in anordinary light, no one not in the secret could have said offhand whetherthat half-brick came out of a Mission tomb in California or asmokehouse in Arkansas. 

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

Selling souvenirs to tourists, who come daily on sightseeing coachesfrom Coronado Beach and San Diego, is the principal pastime of thenatives of Tia Juana. Weekdays they do this; and sometimes on a Sundayafternoon they have a bullfight in their little bullring. On such anoccasion the bullfighting outfit is specially imported from one of thelarger towns farther inland. Sometimes the whole troupe comes fromJuarez and puts on a regular metropolitan production, with the originalall-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 noless daring parabola, sticking little barbed boleros in the bull'swithers; and, last of all, the intrepid mantilla, who calmly meets thefinal rush of the infuriated beast and, with one unerring thrust of histrusty sword, delivers the porte-cochère, or fatal stroke, just behindthe left shoulder-blade, while all about the assembled peons andpianolas 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 thedifficulties of a foreign language? Before I had been in Mexico an hourI had picked up the intricate phraseology of the bullfight; and I wasglad afterward that I took the trouble to get it all down in my mindcorrectly, because such knowledge always comes in handy. You can use itwith effect in company--it stamps you as a person of culture andtravel--and it impresses other people; but then I always could pick upforeign languages easily. I do not wish to boast--but with me it amountsto a positive gift. 

It was a weekday when we visited Tia Juana, and so there was nobullfight going on; in fact, there didn't seem to be much of anythinggoing on. Once in a while a Spigotty lady would pass, closely followedby a couple of little Spigots, and occasionally the postmaster wouldwake up long enough to accept a sheaf of postcards from a tourist andthen go right back to sleep again. We had sampled the tamales of thecountry, finding them only slightly inferior to the same article as soldin Kansas City, Kansas; and we had drifted--three of us--into a Mexicancafé. It was about ten feet square and was hung with chromos furnishedby generous Milwaukee brewers and other decorations familiar to all whohave 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, andthe safest one, too; but somehow I hated--over here upon the soil ofanother country--to be calling for the domestic brews of our own St. Louis! Personally I desired to conform my thirst to the customs of thecountry--only I didn't know what to ask for. I had learned thebullfighting language, but I hadn't progressed very far beyond thatpoint. While I was deliberating a Mexican came in and said something inSpanish to the barkeeper and the barkeeper got a bottle of a clear, almost colorless fluid out from under the counter and poured him asherry glassful of it. So then, by means of a gesture that is universaland is understood in all climes, I indicated to the barkeeper that Iwould take a little of the same. 

The moment, though, that I had swallowed it I realized I had been toohasty. It was mescal--an explosive in liquid form that is brewed orstilled or steeped, or something, from the juices of a certain varietyof cactus, according to a favorite family prescription used by Old Nickseveral centuries ago when he was residing in this section. For its sizeand complexion I know of nothing that is worthy to be mentioned in thesame breath with mescal, unless it is the bald-faced hornet of the SunnySouth. It goes down easily enough--that is not the trouble--but as soonas 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 hadtaken one more swig of the national beverage I am satisfied that notonly would I have seen a great number of them, but, with slightencouragement, might have been one myself. For the purpose of assuagingthe human thirst I would say that it is a mistake on the part of anovice to drink mescal--he should begin by swallowing a lighted kerosenelamp for practice and work up gradually; but the experience wasilluminating as tending to make me understand why the Mexicans are soprone to revolutions. A Mexican takes a drink of mescal beforebreakfast, on an empty stomach, and then he begins to revolute roundregardless. 

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

We could not get close enough to ascertain what all the excitement wasabout, because they would not let us. We were not allowed to venturewithin fifty yards of the outer breastworks, or kneeworks; and eventhen, so the village authorities warned us, we must keep moving. A womancamera fiend from Coronado was along, and she unlimbered her favoriteinstrument with the idea of taking a few snapshots of this martialscene. 

As she leveled the lens a yell went up from somewhere, and out of thebarrack and over the wall came skipping a little officer, leaving atrail of inflammatory Spanish behind him in a way to remind you of thefireman cleaning out the firebox of the Through Limited. He was not muchover five feet tall and his shabby little uniform needed the attentionof the dry cleanser, but he carried a sword and two pistols, and wore abrass gorget at his throat, a pair of huge epaulets and a belt; and hehad gold braid and brass buttons spangled all over his sleeves and thefront 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 abashedcamera lady and, through an interpreter, explained to her that it wasstrictly against the rules to permit a citizen of a foreign power tomake any pictures of the fortifications whatsoever. He appeared to nursea horrid fear that the secret of the fortifications might become knownabove the line, and that some day, armed with this information, the BoyScouts or a Young Ladies' High School might swoop down and capture thewhole works. He explained to the lady, that, much as he regretted it, ifshe persisted in her suspicious and spylike conduct, he would have tosmash her camera for her. So she desisted. 

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

[Illustration: AS THE OCCUPANTS SPILLED SPRAWLINGLY THROUGH THE GAP, AFRONT TIRE EXPLODED WITH A LOUD REPORT]

Every morning, so we heard, they were taking a vote to decide whetherthey would be Federalists that day or Liberalists, or what not; and thevote was invested with a good deal of personal interest, too, becausethere was no telling when a superior force might arrive from theinterior; and if they had happened to vote wrong that day there wasalways the prospect of their being backed up against a wall, withnothing 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 dateof our visit, the garrison had been in the barrack casting their usualballot. They were strong Huertaists that morning--it was Viva Huerta!all the way. Just about the time the vote was being announced a coupleof visiting Americans in an automobile came down the road flanking thefort. There had been a rain and the road was slippery with red mud. Asthe driver took the turn at the corner his wheels began skidding and helost control. The car skewed off at a tangent, hurdled the moat, andtore a hole in the mud wall; and, as the occupants spilled sprawlinglythrough the gap, a front tire exploded with a loud report. The garrisontook just one look out the front door, jumped to the conclusion that theVilla crowd had arrived and were shooting automobiles at them, andunanimously adjourned by the back way into the woods. Some of them didnot get back until the shades of night had descended upon the troubledland. 

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

In an iron letter box in front of the post-office we saw a round holewhere a steel-jacketed bullet had passed through after first passingthrough a prominent citizen. We did not see this citizen. It becamenecessary 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, ablock ahead of me, I saw a group of pedestrians, wrapped in looseflowing garments of many colors. Even at that distance I could make outthat they were dark-skinned and had long black hair. I said to myself:"It is probable that these persons are connected with Doctor Somebody'sMedicine Show; but I don't care if they are. They are Indians--moreIndians than I have seen in one crowd at one time since Buffalo Bill wasat Madison Square Garden last spring. I shall look them over. "

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

In Salt Lake City I saw half a dozen Indians, but in a preserved formonly. They were on display in a museum devoted to relics of the earlydays. In my opinion Indians do not make very good preserves, especiallywhen they have been in stock a long time and have become shopworn, aswas 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 thestate, along with their household goods, their domestic utensils, theirweapons of war and their ornaments; and there they were laid out inglass cases for modern eyes to see. There were plenty of otherinteresting exhibits in this museum, including several of BrighamYoung's suits of clothes. For a man busied with statecraft and militaryaffairs and domestic matters, Brigham Young must have changed clothespretty often. I couldn't keep from wondering how a man with a familylike his was found the time for it. 

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

We visited the museum after we had inspected the Mormon Tabernacle andhad looked at the Mormon Temple--from the outside--and had seen theBeehive and the Lion House and the Eagle Gate and the painfully ornatemansion where Brigham Young kept his favorite wife, Amelia. TheTabernacle is famous the world over for its choir, its organ and itsacoustics--particularly its acoustics. The guide, who is a Mormon elderdetailed for that purpose, escorts you into the balcony, away up underthe domed wooden roof; and as you wait there, listening, another elder, standing upon a platform two hundred feet away, drops an ordinary pinupon the floor--and you can distinctly hear it fall. At first you arepuzzled to decide exactly what it sounds like; but after a while thecorrect solution comes to you--it sounds exactly like a pin falling. Next to the Whispering Gallery in the Capitol at Washington, I don'tknow of a worse place to tell your secrets to a friend than the MormonTabernacle. 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 walkingwith three or four of his wives--all at one time. I felt that this wouldbe a distinct novelty to a person from New York, where the only showone enjoys along this line is the sight of a chap walking with three orfour other men's wives--one at a time. But here, as in my quest for theIndian, I was disappointed some more. Once I thought I was about toscore. I was standing in front of the Zion Coöperative MercantileEstablishment, which is a big department store owned by the Church, buthaving all the latest improvements, including bargain counters andspecial salesdays. Out of the door came an elderly gentleman attired inmuch broadcloth and many whiskers, and behind him trailed half a dozensoberly dressed women of assorted ages. 

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

He was a country bank president from somewhere back East and the womenof his party were Ohio school-teachers. Anywhere except in Utah I doubtif he could have fooled me, either, for he had the kind of whiskersthat go with the banking profession. For some reason whiskers areassociated with the practice of banking all over this country; hallowedby custom, they have come to stand for financial responsibility. A NewYork banker wears those little jib-boom whiskers on the sides of hishead and sometimes a pennon on his chin, whereas a country bankerusually has a full-rigged face. This man's whiskers were of the oldsquare barkentine cut. I should have known who he was by his sailinggear. 

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

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

Through the car came the conductor, with a happy expression upon hisface. Behind him was a pleased-looking flagman leading by the arm aragged tramp who had been caught, up forward somewhere, stealing a freeride. 

The tramp was not resisting exactly, but at every step he said:

"You can't put me off the train between stations! It's the law that youcan't put me off the train between stations!"

Neither the conductor nor the flagman said a word in answer. As theconductor reached up and jerked the bellcord the tramp, in the tone andmanner of one who advances an absolutely unanswerable argument, said:

"You know, don't you, you can't put me off the train between stations?"

The train halted. The conductor unfastened a tail-gate in theguard-rail, and the flagman dropped his prisoner out through theopening. As the tramp flopped off into space I caught this remark:

"You can't put me off the train between stations. "

The conductor tugged another signal on the bellcord, and the wheelsbegan to turn faster and faster. The tramp picked himself up frombetween the rails. He brushed some adhering particles of roadbed offhimself and, facing us, made a megaphone of his hands and sent a messageafter our diminishing shapes. By straining my ears I caught his words. He spoke as follows:

"You can't put me off the train between stations!"

In my whole life I never saw a man who was so hard to convince of athing as that tramp was. 

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Transcriber's Note:

Minor spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation errors have been corrected.