ts or interested in them. It had grown to a
membership of 750. It still kept for its nucleus painters, writers,
musicians and actors, amateur and professional. They were a gay group
of men, and hospitality was their avocation. Yet the thing which set
this club off from all others in the world was the midsummer High
Jinks.

The club owns a fine tract of redwood forest fifty miles north of San
Francisco, on the Russian River. There are two varieties of big trees
in California: the Sequoia gigantea and the Sequoia sempervirens. The
great trees of the Mariposa grove belong to the gigantea species. The
sempervirens, however, reaches the diameter of 16 feet, and some of
the greatest trees of this species are in the Bohemian Club grove. It
lies in a cleft of the mountains; and up one hillside there runs a
natural out of door stage of remarkable acoustic properties.

In August the whole Bohemian Club, or such as could get away from
business, went up to this grove and camp out for two weeks. And on the
last night they put on the Jinks proper, a great spectacle with poetic
words, music and effects done by the club, in praise of the forest. In
late years this had been practically a masque or an opera. It cost
about $10,000. It took the spare time of scores of men for weeks; yet
these 700 business men, professional men, artists, newspaper workers,
struggled for the honor of helping out on the Jinks; and the whole
thing was done naturally and with reverence. It would hardly be
possible anywhere else in this country; the thing which made it
possible is the art spirit which is in the Californian. It runs in the
blood.

Some one has been collecting statistics which prove this point. "Who's
Who in America" is long on the arts and on learning and comparatively
weak in business and the professions. Now some one who has taken the
trouble has found that more persons mentioned in "Who's Who" by the
thousand of the population were born in Massachusetts than in any
other State; but that Massachusetts is crowded closely by California,
with the rest nowhere. The institutions of learning in Massachusetts
account for her pre-eminence; the art spirit does it for California.
The really big men nurtured on California influence are few, perhaps;
but she has sent out an amazing number of good workers in painting, in
authorship, in music and especially in acting.

"High Society" in San Francisco had settled down from the rather wild
spirit of the m