ght the Exposition
ended, to stay for the closing ceremonies until midnight, and then,
without even picking a flower from the abundance they were abandoning,
silently and sorrowfully to walk home.

Let's look into the claims of these Californiacs.

I can unfortunately say little about the State of California. For with
the exception of a few short trips away from San Francisco, and one
meager few days' trip into the South, I have never explored it. Nobody
warned me of the danger of such a proceeding, and so I innocently went
straight to San Francisco the first time I visited the coast. Stranger,
let me warn you now. If ever you start for California with the intention
of seeing anything of the State, do that before you enter San Francisco.
If you must land in San Francisco first, jump into a taxi, pull down the
curtains, drive through the city, breaking every speed law, to "Third
and Townsend," sit in the station until a train,--some train, any
train--pulls out, and go with it. If in crossing Market street, you
raise that taxi-curtain as much as an inch, believe me, stranger, it's
all off; you're lost. You'll never leave San Francisco. Myself, both
times I have gone to California, I have vowed to see Yosemite, the big
trees, the string of beautiful old missions which dot the state, some
of the quaint, languid, semi-tropical towns of the south, some of the
brisk, brilliant, bustling towns of the north. But I have never really
done it because I saw San Francisco first.

I treasure my few impressions of the state, however. Towns and cities,
comparatively new, might be three centuries old, so beautifully have
they sunk into the colorful, deeply configurated background that the
country provides. Even a city as thriving and wide-awake as Stockton has
about its plaza an air so venerable that it is a little like the
ancient hill-cities of Italy; more like, I have no doubt, the ancient
plain-cities of Spain. And San Juan Bautista--with its history-haunted
old Inn, its ghost-haunted old Mission and its rose-filled old Mission
garden where everything, even the sundial, seems to sleep--is as old as
Babylon or Tyre.

You will be constantly reminded of Italy, although California is not
quite so vividly colored, and perhaps of Japan, for you are always
coming on places that are startlingly like scenes in Japanese prints.
Certain aspects from the bay of the town of Sausalito, with strangely
shaped and softly tinted houses tumbling do