. Mazzini for pages, but I started to speak of Dante.

I like the Italians and I like the Latin quarter where they live. I like
it better than Ashbury Heights for instance. I like the way the Italians
use their windows to look out of and to lean out of, and I like the way
they have socialized the sidewalk. It's all a matter of taste, and I
wouldn't criticize the people of Ashbury Heights simply because they use
their well-curtained windows only to admit the light, and do not lean
out and gossip with their neighbors and yell to their children, "Mahree,
Mahree," nor sit out on their steps in the evening and play Rigoletto on
the accordion. It's all a matter of taste.

Six hundred years ago Dante was an Italian, but he is much more than
that today. After six centuries Dante belongs to all those and only
those who can read him with appreciation and pleasure. Our scavenger is
an Italian, and he reads Dante just as so many of the Anglo Saxon
proletair read Shakespeare. So Dante belongs to this garbage man, not
because he is Italian, but because he sincerely loves the Divina
Commedia. A waiter, in Il Trovatore, a rarely honest man, acknowledged
to me that he could not read Dante, and that every time he tried he got
mad and threw the book away.

Dante belongs to the literary elect of all nations, Dante belongs to the
great internationale of the immortals. Dante belongs to Eternity. And
for that matter so does Mr. Mazzini.

On the Nob of Nob Hill

On the very nob of Nob Hill there is the ruin of a mansion which was the
Whittell home. In ruins it still is a mansion. In ruins it is grander
than any place around because it belonged to the grand days.

There is an enclosed garden in the rear after the fashion of old Spanish
gardens in Monterey. And between the boards that cover a door in the
high wall, one may peek and catch a glimpse of hollyhocks in a row and
roses running wild, trellises of green lattice and ghosts of beautiful
ladies having afternoon tea.

To one side of the mansion there is a formal garden that hugs up close
to the ivy-covered walls of the house. It is such a garden as one sees
in elaborately illustrated copies of Mother Goose "with silver bells and
cockle shells." It's so beautiful that it doesn't seem real. California
gardens are like that, and to those of us from bleak countries they look
like pictures out of books. There is this well-groomed garden of the
living present hugging up close to th