ves and the secret
lazarettos of disease.

With all this mass of nationalities, crime is common. There are rough
quarters where it is dangerous o' nights; cellars of public
entertainment which the wary pleasure-seeker chooses to avoid. Concealed
weapons are unlawful, but the law is continually broken. One editor was
shot dead while I was there; another walked the streets accompanied by a
bravo, his guardian angel. I have been quietly eating a dish of oysters
in a restaurant, where, not more than ten minutes after I had left,
shots were exchanged and took effect; and one night about ten o'clock, I
saw a man standing watchfully at a street-corner with a long
Smith-and-Wesson glittering in his hand behind his back. Somebody had
done something he should not, and was being looked for with a vengeance.
It is odd, too, that the seat of the last vigilance committee I know
of--a mediaeval _Vehmgericht_--was none other than the Palace Hotel, the
world's greatest caravanserai, served by lifts and lit with electricity;
where, in the great glazed court, a band nightly discourses music from a
grove of palms. So do extremes meet in this city of contrasts: extremes
of wealth and poverty, apathy and excitement, the conveniences of
civilisation and the red justice of Judge Lynch.

The streets lie straight up and down the hills, and straight across at
right angles, these in sun, those in shadow, a trenchant pattern of
gloom and glare; and what with the crisp illumination, the sea-air
singing in your ears, the chill and glitter, the changing aspects both
of things and people, the fresh sights at every corner of your
walk--sights of the bay, of Tamalpais, of steep, descending streets, of
the outspread city--whiffs of alien speech, sailors singing on
shipboard, Chinese coolies toiling on the shore, crowds brawling all day
in the street before the Stock Exchange--one brief impression follows
and obliterates another, and the city leaves upon the mind no general
and stable picture, but a profusion of airy and incongruous images, of
the sea and shore, the east and west, the summer and the winter.

In the better parts of the most interesting city there is apt to be a
touch of the commonplace. It is in the slums and suburbs that the city
dilettante finds his game. And there is nothing more characteristic and
original than the outlying quarters of San Francisco. The Chinese
district is the most famous; but it is far from the only truffle in the