time in making what amends he could for the
disaster.

The completeness of organization at Palo Alto, a town of ten thousand
inhabitants close to Stanford University, was almost comical. People
feared exodus on a large scale of the rowdy elements of San Francisco.
In point of tact, very few refugees came to Palo Alto. But within
twenty-four hours, rations, clothing, hospital, quarantine,
disinfection, washing, police, military, quarters in camp and in
houses, printed information, employment, all were provided for under
the care of so many volunteer committees.

Much of this readiness was American, much of it Californian; but I
believe that every country in a similar crisis would have displayed it
in a way to astonish the spectators. Like soldiering, it lies always
latent in human nature.

The second thing that struck me was the universal equanimity. We soon
got letters from the East, ringing with anxiety and pathos; but I now
know fully what I have always believed, that the pathetic way of
feeling great disasters belongs rather to the point of view of people
at a distance than to the immediate victims. I heard not a single
really pathetic or sentimental word in California expressed by any one.

The terms "awful," "dreadful" fell often enough from people's lips, but
always with a sort of abstract meaning, and with a face that seemed to
admire the vastness of the catastrophe as much as it bewailed its
cuttingness. When talk was not directly practical, I might almost say
that it expressed (at any rate in the nine days I was there) a tendency
more toward nervous excitement than toward grief. The hearts concealed
private bitterness enough, no doubt, but the tongues disdained to dwell
on the misfortunes of self, when almost everybody one spoke to had
suffered equally.

Surely the cutting edge of all our usual misfortunes comes from their
character of loneliness. We lose our health, our wife or children die,
our house burns down, or our money is made way with, and the world goes
on rejoicing, leaving us on one side and counting us out from all its
business. In California every one, to some degree, was suffering, and
one's private miseries were merged in the vast general sum of privation
and in the all-absorbing practical problem of general recuperation.
The cheerfulness, or, at any rate, the steadfastness of tone, was
universal. Not a single whine or plaintive word did I hear from the
hundred losers whom I spo