day long and tell strange yarns.
Stevenson lay there with them in his time and learned the things which
he wrote into "The Wrecker" and his South Sea stories, and in the
center of the square there stood the beautiful Stevenson monument. In
later years the authorities put up a municipal building on one side of
this square and prevented the loungers, for decency's sake, from lying
on the grass. Since then some of the peculiar character of the old
plaza had gone.

The Barbary Coast was a loud bit of hell. No one knows who coined the
name. The place was simply three blocks of solid dance halls, there
for the delight of the sailors of the world. On a fine busy night
every door blared loud dance music from orchestra, steam pianos and
gramophones and the cumulative effect of the sound which reached the
street was at least strange. Almost anything might be happening behind
the swinging doors. For a fine and picturesque bundle of names
characteristic of the place, a police story of three or four years ago
is typical. Hell broke out in the Eye Wink Dance Hall. The trouble
was started by a sailor known as Kanaka Pete, who lived in the What
Cheer House, over a woman known as Iodoform Kate. Kanaka Pete chased
the man he had marked to the Little Silver Dollar, where he turned and
punctured him. The by-product of his gun made some holes in the front
of the Eye Wink, which were proudly kept as souvenirs, and were
probably there until it went out in the fire. This was low life, the
lowest of the low.

Until the last decade almost anything except the commonplace and the
expected might happen to a man on the water front. The cheerful
industry of shanghaiing was reduced to a science. A stranger taking a
drink in one of the saloons which hung out over the water might be
dropped through the floor into a boat, or he might drink with a
stranger and wake in the forecastle of a whaler bound for the Arctic.
Such an incident is the basis of Frank Norris's novel, "Moran of the
Lady Letty," and although the novel draws it pretty strong, it is not
exaggerated. Ten years ago the police and the foreign consuls, working
together, stopped this.

Kearney street, a wilder and stranger Bowery, was the main
thoroughfare of these people. An exiled Californian, mourning over the
city of his heart, said recently:

"In a half an hour of Kearney street I could raise a dozen men for any
wild adventure, from pulling down a statue to searching for the Cocos
I