e world,
who came in and out from among the queer craft to lose themselves in the
disreputable shanties and saloons. The Barbary Coast was a veritable bit
of Satan's realm. The place was made up of three solid blocks of dance
halls, for the delectation of the sailors of the world. Within those
streets of peril the respectable never set foot; behind the swinging
doors of those saloons anything might be happening, crime was as common
here as drink, and much went on of which the law was blankly ignorant.

Not far removed from this haunt of crime was the world-famous Chinatown,
a district six blocks long and two wide, and housing when at its fullest
some 30,000 Chinese. Old business houses at first, the new inmates added
to them, rebuilt them, ran out their own balconies and entrances, and
gave them that feeling of huddled irregularity which makes all Chinese
built dwellings fall naturally into pictures. Not only this, they
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, by murder if they saw fit. The law was
powerless to prevent or discover and convict the murderers.

Chinatown is gone; the Barbary Coast is gone; the haunts of crime have
been swept by the devouring flames, and if the citizens can prevent
they will never be restored. The old San Francisco is dead. The gayest,
lightest-hearted, most pleasure-loving city of this continent, and
in many ways the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of huddled
refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those
who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate and have caught its
flavor of the Arabian Nights feel that it can never be the same. When it
rises out of its ashes it will probably doubtless resemble other modern
cities and have lost its old strange flavor.

CHAPTER XII.

Life in the Metropolis of the Pacific

Brought up in a bountiful country, where no one really has to work very
hard to live, nurtured on adventure, scion of a free and merry stock,
the real, native Californian is a distinctive type; as far from the
Easterner in psychology as the extreme Southern is from the Yankee. He
is easy going, witty, hospitable, lovable, inclined to be unmoral rather
than immoral in his personal habits, and above all easy to meet and to
know