s a
never-failing topic of congenial conversation; and 3--He assures you
with a regretful sighing note in his voice that the old-time romance
disappeared with the destruction of the old-time buildings, the old-time
resorts and the old-time neighborhoods.

It has been my experience that romance is always in the past tense
anyhow. Romance is a commodity that was extremely plentiful last week or
last year or last century, but for the moment they are entirely out of
it, and can't say with any degree of certainty when a fresh stock will
be coming in. This is largely true of all the formerly romantic cities I
know anything about, and it appears to be especially true of San
Francisco. Romance invariably acquires added value after it has
vanished; in this respect it is very much like a history-making epoch.
An epoch rarely seems to create any great amount of excitement when it
is in process of epoching, or at least the excitement is only temporary
and soon abates. Afterward we look back upon it with a feeling of
longing, but when it was actually coming to pass we took it--after the
first shock of surprise--as a matter of course.

No doubt our children and our children's children will read in the
text-books that the first decade of the twentieth century was
distinguished as the age when the auto and tango came into use, and
people learned to fly, and grown men wore bracelet watches and carried
their handkerchiefs up their cuffs; and they will repine because they,
too, did not live in those stirring times. But we of the present
generation who recently passed through these experiences have already
accepted them without undue excitement, just as our forefathers in their
day accepted the submarine cable, the galvanic battery and the congress
gaiter.

[Illustration: EVEN THE PLACE WHERE THE TURKEY TROT ORIGINATED WAS
TROTLESS AND QUIET]

Age and antiquity give an added value to everything except an egg. In my
own case I know how it was with regard to the Egyptian scarab. For years
I felt that I could never rest satisfied until I had gone to Egypt and
had personally broken into the tomb of some sleeping Pharaoh or some
crumbly old Rameses, and with my own hands had ravished from it a
mummified specimen of that fabled beetle which the ancients worshiped
and buried with them in their tombs. But not long ago I made the
discovery that, in coloring, habits, customs and general walk and
conversation, the scarab of the Egyptians was non