t, and that life and property were now "as safe in
San Francisco as in New York or London."

Wonder-loving visitors in quest of scenes characteristic of the
civilization were coldly snubbed with this assurance. Fires, floods, and
even seismic convulsions were subjected to a like grimly materialistic
optimism. I have a vivid recollection of a ponderous editorial on one
of the severer earthquakes, in which it was asserted that only the
UNEXPECTEDNESS of the onset prevented San Francisco from meeting it in
a way that would be deterrent of all future attacks. The unconsciousness
of the humor was only equaled by the gravity with which it was
received by the whole business community. Strangely enough, this grave
materialism flourished side by side with--and was even sustained by--a
narrow religious strictness more characteristic of the Pilgrim Fathers
of a past century than the Western pioneers of the present. San
Francisco was early a city of churches and church organizations to which
the leading men and merchants belonged. The lax Sundays of the dying
Spanish race seemed only to provoke a revival of the rigors of the
Puritan Sabbath. With the Spaniard and his Sunday afternoon bullfight
scarcely an hour distant, the San Francisco pulpit thundered against
Sunday picnics. One of the popular preachers, declaiming upon the
practice of Sunday dinner-giving, averred that when he saw a guest in
his best Sunday clothes standing shamelessly upon the doorstep of his
host, he felt like seizing him by the shoulder and dragging him from
that threshold of perdition.

Against the actual heathen the feeling was even stronger, and reached
its climax one Sunday when a Chinaman was stoned to death by a crowd of
children returning from Sunday-school. I am offering these examples
with no ethical purpose, but merely to indicate a singular contradictory
condition which I do not think writers of early Californian history have
fairly recorded. It is not my province to suggest any theory for
these appalling exceptions to the usual good-humored lawlessness and
extravagance of the rest of the State. They may have been essential
agencies to the growth and evolution of the city. They were undoubtedly
sincere. The impressions I propose to give of certain scenes and
incidents of my early experience must, therefore, be taken as purely
personal and Bohemian, and their selection as equally individual and
vagrant. I am writing of what interested me at the tim