. Here is a Hungarian
restaurant. And the "O. K. Shoe Shop--While U Wait" is pure American.

There is "Sam's Tailor Shop." I feel as though I should know this fellow
Sam. Apparently he knows me from his chummy sign. Sam, Sam--I ought to
remember Sam.

Do you wish to paint and varnish? Well, here you are. Or to be shaved or
have your eye-brows arched? Walk right in. Here is a place to learn to
paint china. Here are drugs, corsets, religion, fish, statuary, cigars
and choice meats all in a row. Meats, on Fillmore street, are always
"choice" or "selected" or "stall-fed." I doubt if you could get just
"meat" if you tried. Next to the meats, out on a table before a
second-hand book store is romantic, old "St. Elmo" of mid-Victorian
fame. He must have come West by the "Pony Express."

I always stop, if I have time, to look at shoes to be mended. They are
like people who have fallen asleep in public, off their guard and at
their very worst. Take a shoe--a real, old shoe without a foot in it
and it looks so foolish, betraying so mercilessly its owner's bumps and
peculiar toes. There is pathos there, too. A scrub woman's run-down
shoes, a kiddie's scuffed-out toes, a man's clumsy, clay-stained boots
and the happy dancing slippers of a young girl.

Back of the shoes--the cobbler. Cobblers are always philosophers. Not
pretty men, but thinkers. In their little, dingy shops they sit all day
with their eyes down, isolated from the "hum and scum" about them, to
the tune of their "tap, tap, tap," their minds are detached to think and
philosophize and vision.

Now we are at the corner where we turn away from Fillmore street. There
is a window full of dolls. Such a lot of homely dolls. They don't make
pretty dolls any more. They make them to look like humans. "Character"
dolls they call them and they are "characters." Now, when I was a little
girl, they made dolls to look the way you wished human beings could
look.--It is not hard to turn the corner.

In the Lobby of the St. Francis

There is something about having money enough to stay at the St. Francis,
and to dine there and to wear smart clothes there that makes people step
out and act sure of themselves. Even when they can't afford it, and
their stay there is a splurge or an outing, they act just as sure and
stepping. And as for the people to whom the St. Francis is but an
incident they act sure because they were born that way.

Never in my life have I seen such sure