rd shanties. Overhead the drunken
telegraph, telephone, and electric-light wires tangled on the tottering
posts whose butts were half-whittled through by the knife of the loafer.
Down the muddy, grimy, unmetalled thoroughfare ran a horse-car line--the
metals three inches above road level. Beyond this street rose many
hills, and the town was thrown like a broken set of dominoes over all. A
steam tramway--it left the track the only time I used it--was nosing
about the hills, but the most prominent features of the landscape were
the foundations in brick and stone of a gigantic opera house and the
blackened stumps of the pines. California sized up the town with one
comprehensive glance. "Big boom," said he; and a few instants later:
"About time to step off, _I_ think," meaning thereby that the boom had
risen to its limit, and it would be expedient not to meddle with it. We
passed down ungraded streets that ended abruptly in a fifteen-foot drop
and a nest of brambles; along pavements that beginning in pine-plank
ended in the living tree; by hotels with Turkish mosque trinketry on
their shameless tops, and the pine stamps at their very doors; by a
female seminary, tall, gaunt and red, which a native of the town bade us
marvel at, and we marvelled; by houses built in imitation of the ones on
Nob Hill, San Francisco,--after the Dutch fashion; by other houses
plenteously befouled with jig-saw work, and others flaring with the
castlemented, battlemented bosh of the wooden Gothic school.

"You can tell just about when those fellers had their houses built,"
quoth California. "That one yonder wanted to be _I_talian, and his
architect built him what he wanted. The new houses with the low straddle
roofs and windows pitched in sideways and red brick walls are Dutch.
That's the latest idea. I can read the history of the town." I had no
occasion so to read. The natives were only too glad and too proud to
tell me. The hotel walls bore a flaming panorama of Tacoma in which by
the eye of faith I saw a faint resemblance to the real town. The hotel
stationary advertised that Tacoma bore on its face all the advantages of
the highest civilisation, and the newspapers sang the same tune in a
louder key. The real-estate agents were selling house-lots on unmade
streets miles away for thousands of dollars. On the streets--the rude,
crude streets, where the unshaded electric light was fighting with the
gentle northern twilight--men were babbling of mo