n the world;
undoubtedly it is the noisiest in the world. The tracks seem to run
through every street; there is a curve at every corner, I think, and a
switch in the middle of every block. Every thirty seconds or so a car
comes along, and it always comes at top speed and takes the curve
without slackening up; and the motorman is always clanging his gong in a
whole-souled manner that would entitle him to membership in the Swiss
Bellringers.

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

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

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