iddle period; it had come to be there a good deal as it
is elsewhere. There was much wealth; and the hills of the western
addition were growing up with fine mansions. Outside of the city, at
Burlingame, there was a fine country club centering a region of
country estates which stretched out to Menlo Park. This club had a
good polo team, which played every year with teams of Englishmen from
southern California and even with teams from Honolulu.

The foreign quarters were worth a chapter in themselves. Chief of
these was, of course, Chinatown, of which every one has heard who ever
heard of San Francisco. A district six blocks long and two blocks
wide, when the quarter was full, housed 30,000 Chinese. The dwellings
were old business blocks of the early days; but the Chinese had added
to them, rebuilt them, had run out their own balconies and entrances,
and had given it that feeling of huddled irregularity which makes all
Chinese built dwellings fall naturally into pictures. Not only this,
they had burrowed to a depth equal to three stories under the ground,
and through this ran passages in which the Chinese transacted their
dark and devious affairs--as the smuggling of opium, the traffic in
slave girls and the settlement of their difficulties.

There was less of this underground life than formerly, for the Board
of Health had a cleanup some time ago; but it was still possible to go
from one end of Chinatown to the other through secret underground
passages. The Chinese lived there their own life in their own way. The
Chinatown of New York is dull beside it. And the tourist, who always
included Chinatown in his itinerary, saw little of the real life. The
guides gave him a show by actors hired for his benefit. In reality the
place had considerable importance in a financial way. There were
clothing and cigar factories of importance, and much of the tea and
silk importing was in the hands of the merchants, who numbered several
millionaires. Mainly, however, it was a Tenderloin for the house
servants of the city--for the San Francisco Chinaman was seldom a
laundryman; he was too much in demand at fancy prices as a servant.

The Chinese lived their own lives in their own way and settled their
own quarrels with the revolvers of their highbinders. There were two
theaters in the quarter, a number of rich joss houses, three
newspapers and a Chinese telephone exchange. There is a race feeling
against the Chinese among the working peo