t by
postal, by letter, by dodgers, by advertisements in the papers and on
the billboards to vote for all of them. Would that I had space--but here
I must take the space--to tell how the Californian plays.

Remember always that California has virtually no weather to contend
with. For three months of the year rain appears; for the remaining
nine months it is eliminated entirely. And so, with a country of rare
picture-esqueness for a background, a people of rare beauty for
actors, everybody more or less permeated with the artistic instinct
and everybody more or less writing poetry--California has a pageant for
breakfast, a fiesta for luncheon and a carnival for dinner. They are
always electing queens. In fact any girl in California, who hasn't been
a queen of something before she's twenty-one, is a poor prune.

In the country, especially in the wine districts where the merrymaking
sometimes lasts for days, these festivals are beautiful. In the city
it depends largely, of course, on how much the commercial spirit enters
into it; but whether they are beautiful or the reverse, they are always
entertaining. Single streets, for instance, in San Francisco, are always
having carnivals. The street elects a king and queen, plasters itself
with bunting, arches itself with electric lights, lines its curbs with
temporary booths, fills its corners with shows, sells confetti until the
pedestrian swims in it--and then whoops it up for a week. All around,
north, south, east, west, every other street is jet-black, sleeping
decorously, ignoring utterly that blare of color, that blaze of light,
that boom of noise around the corner. They should worry--they're going
to have a carnival themselves next week. Apropos, a San Francisco paper
opened its story of one of these affairs with the following sentence:
"Last night (shall we call him Hans Schmidt?) was crowned with great
pomp and ceremony king of the--Street Carnival, and fifteen minutes
later, with no pomp and ceremony whatever, he was arrested for petty
larceny." Billy Jordan was made King of the Fillmore Street Carnival.
Now Billy Jordan, who was over eighty years of age, had served as
announcer for every big boxing contest in San Francisco since--well,
let's say, since San Francisco was born. He always ends his ring
announcement with the words, "Let her go!" The reporters say that in
the crown and sceptre, the velvet and ermine of a king, he opened the
Fillmore Street Carnival with "Le