I was disappointed, in my
character of looker-on, to have the matter end ingloriously without the
firing of a shot or the hanging of a single millionaire, philosophy
tried to tell me that this sight was truly the more picturesque. In a
thousand towns and different epochs I might have had occasion to behold
the cowardice and carnage of street-fighting; where else, but only there
and then, could I have enjoyed a view of Coleman (the intermittent
despot) walking meditatively up hill in a quiet part of town, with a
very rolling gait, and slapping gently his great thigh?

_Minora canamus_. This historic figure stalks silently through a corner
of the San Francisco of my memory. The rest is bric-a-brac, the
reminiscences of a vagrant sketcher. My delight was much in slums.
"Little Italy," was a haunt of mine. There I would look in at the
windows of small eating-shops transported bodily from Genoa or Naples,
with their macaroni, and chianti flasks, and portraits of Garibaldi, and
coloured political caricatures; or (entering in) hold high debate with
some ear-ringed fisher of the bay as to the designs of "Mr. Owstria" and
"Mr. Rooshia." I was often to be observed (had there been any to observe
me) in that dis-peopled, hill-side solitude of "Little Mexico," with its
crazy wooden houses, endless crazy wooden stairs, and perilous
mountain-goat paths in the sand. China-town by a thousand
eccentricities drew and held me; I could never have enough of its
ambiguous, inter-racial atmosphere, as of a vitalised museum; never
wonder enough at its outlandish, necromantic-looking vegetables set
forth to sell in commonplace American shop-windows, its temple doors
open and the scent of the joss-stick streaming forth on the American
air, its kites of Oriental fashion hanging fouled in Western
telegraph-wires, its flights of paper prayers which the trade-wind hunts
and dissipates along Western gutters. I was a frequent wanderer on North
Beach, gazing at the straits, and the huge Cape Horners creeping out to
sea, and imminent Tamalpais. Thence, on my homeward way, I might visit
that strange and filthy shed, earth-paved and walled with the cages of
wild animals and birds, where at a ramshackle counter, amid the yells of
monkeys, and a poignant atmosphere of menagerie, forty-rod whisky was
administered by a proprietor as dirty as his beasts. Nor did I even
neglect Nob Hill, which is itself a kind of slum, being the habitat of
the mere millionaire.