d has opportunely
developed back East somewhere and is available for purposes of
comparison. At Los Angeles, which is the great throbbing heart of the
climate belt, I went as a guest to a stag given at the handsome new
clubhouse of a secret order renowned the continent over for its
hospitality and its charities. We sat, six or seven hundred of us, in a
big assembly hall, smoked cigars and drank light drinks, and witnessed
some corking good sparring bouts by non-professional talent. There were
two or three ministers present--fine, alert representatives of the
modern type of city clergymen. When eleven o'clock came the master of
ceremonies announced the toast, To Our Absent Brothers! and called upon
one of those clergymen to respond to it.

The minister climbed up on the platform--a tall man, with a thick crop
of hair and a profile as clean cut as a cameo and as mobile as an
actor'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 to
the spirit of fraternity that fairly lifted us out of our chairs. Every
man there was touched, I think--and deeply touched; no man who believed
in the brotherhood of man, whether he practiced it or not, could have
listened unmoved to that speech. He spoke of the absent ones. Some of
them he said had answered the last rollcall, and some were stretched
upon the bed of affliction, and some were unavoidably detained by
business in the East; and he intimated that those in the last category
who had been away for as long as three weeks wouldn't know the old place
when they got back!--Applause.

This naturally brought him round to the subject of Los Angeles as a city
of business and homes. He pointed out its marvelous growth--quoting
freely from the latest issue of the city directory and other reliable
authorities to prove his figures; he made a few heartrousing predictions
touching on its future prospects, as tending to show that in a year or
less San Francisco and other ambitious contenders along the Coast would
be eating at the second table; he peopled the land clear back to the
mountains with new homes and new neighbors; and he wound up, in a burst
of vocal glory, with the most magnificent testimonial for the climate I
ever heard any climate get. Did he move his audience then? Oh, but
didn't he move them, though! Along toward the close of the third minute
of uninterrupted cheering I thought the roof was gone.

On