y trouts down below looking up with
expectant looks in their eyes--I could see their eyes--and jumping round
regardless; and yet not a bite! So I changed bait--changed from live
bait to dead bait, and back again to live--and still there wasn't
nothing doing. So I says to myself: 'Something's wrong, sure! This
thing'll stand looking into.'

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

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

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

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

Of course, there are a lot of real Southerners; but there are a whole
lot more who--so it seemed to me--are giving remarkably realistic
imitations of the type known in New York