r the music, which was to be
heard everywhere.

Another part of the gay life of the city was for a private dance to keep
going all night in a fashionable residence, and at daylight, instead of
everybody going to bed, to jump into automobiles or carriages or take
the trolley cars and whizz off to the beach for a dip in the cold salt
water pool at Sutro's baths, and then, with ravenous appetites, sit down
on the Cliff House balcony to an open-air breakfast while watching the
ships sail in and out at the Golden Gate and hearing the seals barking
on the rocks. After that home and to rest.

AN ALL-NIGHT TOWN.

The city never went to sleep altogether. It was "an all-night" town. Few
of the restaurants ever closed, none of the saloons did. Always during
the whole twenty-four hours of the day there was "something doing" in
the Tenderloin. No hour of the night was ever free of revelry. It was
marvelous how they kept it up. The average San Franciscan could stay
awake all night at a card game, take a cold wash and a good breakfast
in the morning, and go straight downtown to business and feel none the
worse for it.

It was a gay town, a captivating, piquant, audacious, but not especially
wicked city. A Frenchy, a risque city it might justly have been called,
but it was not wicked in the sense that sordid vice, vulgar crime and
wretched squalor constitute wickedness.

It was a lovable place that everybody longed to get back to, once
having been there. A woman, leaving it for years, watched it from the
ferryboat, and, weeping, said, "San Francisco, oh, my San Francisco, I
am leaving thee."

Will those who left it after the fire ever get back to their old
city again? We have already expressed our doubt of this. The old San
Francisco is probably gone, never to return. The new San Francisco will
be a cleaner, saner and safer city, destitute of its rookeries, its
tenements and its Chinatown. It will be a greater and more sightly
city than that of the past, but to those who knew and loved the old San
Francisco--San Francisco the captivating, the maddest, gayest, liveliest
and most rollicking in the country--there must be something impressibly
sad to its old inhabitants in the reflection that the new city of the
Golden Gate can never be quite the same as the haven of their early
affections.

CHAPTER XIII.

Plans to Rebuild San Francisco.

Almost as soon as the terrible conflagration had been checked and gotten
under