e other than the
common tumblebug of the Southern dirt roads. Right there was where I
lost interest in the scarab. He was no novelty to me--not after that he
wasn't. As a boy I had known him intimately.

So, when I was repeatedly assured that the old-time romance had vanished
from San Francisco, and with it the atmosphere that bred Bohemianism and
developed literature and art, and kept alive the spirit of the
Forty-niner times, and all that, I made my own allowances. Those who
mourned for the fire-blasted past may have been right, in a measure.
Certainly the old-time Chinatown isn't there any more--or, at any rate,
isn't there in its physical aspects. The rebuilt Chinatown of San
Francisco, though infinitely larger, isn't so picturesque really or so
Chinesey looking as New York's Chinatown.

I did not dare to give utterance to this treasonable statement until I
was well away from San Francisco, but it is true all the same. I cruised
the shores of the far-famed and much-written-about Barbary Coast; and
it seemed to me that in its dun-colored tiresomeness and in its
miserable transparent counterfeit of joy it was up to the general
metropolitan average--that it was just as tiresome and humdrum as the
avowedly wicked section of any city always is.

However, I was told that I had arrived just one week too late to see the
Barbary Coast at its best--meaning by that its worst; for during the
week before the police, growing virtuous, had put the crusher on the
dance-halls and the hobble on the tango-twisters. Even the place where
the turkey trot originated--a place that would naturally be a shrine to
a New Yorker--was trotless and quiet--in mourning for its firstborn.

The so-called French restaurants, which for years gave an unwholesome
savor to certain phases of San Francisco life, had likewise been
sterilized and purified. I wished I might have got there before the
housecleaning took place; but, even so, I should probably have been
disappointed. What makes the vice of ancient Babylon seem by contrast
more seductive to us than the vice of the Bowery is that Babylon is gone
and the Bowery isn't.

Likewise the night life of San Francisco, of which in times past I had
read so much, was disillusionizing, because it wasn't visible to the
naked eye. On this proposition Los Angeles puts it all over San
Francisco; for this, though, there is an easy explanation. Los Angeles
boasts what is said to be the completest trolley system i