ittle, slim-limbed creatures, amber-skinned, jewel-eyed,
dressed in silk of black or pastel colors, loosely coated and
comfortably trousered, their jet-black shining hair filled with
ornaments, they go about in groups which include old women and young
matrons, half-grown girls slender as forsythia branches, babies arrayed
like princes. You are likely to meet groups of Hindus, picturesquely
turbaned, coffee-brown in color, slight-figured, straight-featured,
black-bearded. You see Japanese and Filipinos. And as for
Latins--French, Italians and Spanish flood the city. There are eight
thousand Montenegrins alone in California. I never suspected there
were eight thousand in Montenegro. And our own continent contributes
Canadians, Mexicans, citizens from every State in the Union. In
addition, you run everywhere into soldiers and sailors. The bits of
talk you overhear in the street are so exciting that you become a
professional eavesdropper, strong-languaged, picturesquely slangy,
pungent narrative. Sometimes the speaker has come up from Arizona, or
New Mexico or Texas, sometimes down from Alaska, Washington or Oregon,
sometimes across from Nevada or Montana or Wyoming. And with many of
them--at least with those that live west of the rocky mountains--San
Francisco is always (and I never failed to respond to the thrill of it)
"the city". Not a city or any city, but the city--as though there were
no other city on the face of the earth.

All this alien picturesqueness adds enormously of course to the San
Franciscan's native picturesqueness. Not that the Californian needs
adventitious aid in this matter. Indeed this cosmopolitanism of
atmosphere serves best as a background, these alien types as a foil, for
the native-born. For the Californians are a comely people. No traveler
has failed--at least no man has failed--to pay tribute in passing to
the Californian women. And they are beautiful. In that climate which
produces bigness in everything, they grow to heroic size. And as
a result of a life, inevitably open-air in an atmosphere always
fog-touched, they have eyes of a notable limpidity and complexions of
a striking vividness. To walk through that limited area which is the
city's heart--especially when the theatres are letting out--is to come
on beauty not in one pretty girl at a time, nor in pairs and trios, nor
by scores and dozens; it is to see it in battalias and acres, and all
of them meeting your eyes with the frank open ga