t--the Native Daughter or the Native
Son. But I do know that it couldn't have happened anywhere but in
California.

The first time I visited San Francisco shortly after the fire, I was
walking one day in rather a lonely part of the city. There were many
burnt areas about: only a few pedestrians. Presently, I saw a man and
woman leaning against a fence, absorbed in conversation. Apparently they
did not hear my approach; they were too deep in talk. They did not look
out of the ordinary and, indeed, I should not have given them a second
glance if, as I passed, I had not heard the woman say, "And did you kill
anyone else?"

A man told me that once early in the morning he was walking through
Chinatown. There was nobody else on the street except, a little distance
ahead, a child carrying a small bundle. Suddenly just as she passed,
a panel in one of the houses slid open... a hand came out... the child
slipped the bundle into the hand... the hand disappeared... the wall
panel closed up. The child trotted on as though nothing had happened...
disappeared around the corner. When my friend reached the house, it was
impossible to locate the panel.

A reporter I know was leaving his home one morning when there came a
ring at his telephone. "There is something wrong in apartment number
blank, house number blank, on your street," said Central. "Will you
please go over there at once?" He went. Somehow he got into the house.
Nobody answered his ring at the apartment; he had to break the door
open. Inside a very beautiful girl in a gay negligee was lying dead on
a couch, a bottle of poison on the floor beside her. He investigated the
case. The dead girl had been in the habit of calling a certain number,
and she always used a curious identifying code-phrase. The reporter
investigated that number. The rest of the story is long and thrilling,
but finally he ran down a group of lawbreakers who had been selling the
dead girl drugs, were indirectly responsible for her suicide. Do you
suppose such a ripe story could have dropped straight from the Tree of
Life into the hand of a reporter anywhere except in California?

A woman I know was once waiting on the corner for a car. Near, she
happened casually to notice, was a Chinaman of a noticeable, dried
antiquity, shuffling along under the weight of a bunch of bananas. She
was at that moment considering a curious mental problem and, in her
preoccupation, she drew her hand down the length of her