e wonderful one, and the hand of man did not
need to touch it. When Nature got through with it, it was a complete and
satisfactory job.

The first convincing impression the newcomer gets of San Francisco is
that here is a permanent city--a city that has found itself, has
achieved its own personality, and is satisfied with it. Perhaps, because
they are growing so fast, certain of the other Coast cities strike the
casual observer as having just been put up. I was told that a man who
lives on a residential street of San Diego has to mark his house with
chalk when he leaves of a morning in order to know it when he gets home
at night. A real-estate agent told me so, and I do not think a Southern
California real-estate agent would deceive anybody--more particularly a
stranger from the East. So it must be true. And Los Angeles' main
business district is like a transverse slice chopped out of the middle
of Manhattan Island. It isn't Western. It is typically New Yorky--as
alive as New York and as handsomely done. You can almost imagine you are
at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street.

San Francisco, it seems to me, isn't like any city on earth except San
Francisco. Once you get away from the larger hotels, which are accurate
copies of the metropolitan article of the East, even to the afternoon
tea-fighting melees of the women, you find yourself in a city that is
absolutely individual and distinctive. It impresses its originality upon
you; it presents itself with an air of having been right there from the
beginning--and this, too, in spite of the fact that the ravages of the
great fire are still visible in old cellar excavations and piles of
debris. Practically every building in the main part of the town has
been rebuilt within eight years and is still new. The scars are fresh,
but the spirit is old and abides.

This same essence of individuality tinctures the lives, the manners and
the conversations of the people. They do not strike you as being
Westerners or as being transplanted Easterners; they are San
Franciscans. Even when all other signs fail you may, nevertheless,
instantly discern certain unfailing traits--to wit, as follows: 1--A San
Franciscan shudders with ill-concealed horror when anybody refers to his
beloved city as Frisco--which nobody ever does unless it be a raw alien
from the other side of the continent; 2--He does not brag of the climate
with that constancy which provides his neighbor of Los Angele