"Because they would die," I said.
It was exactly like talking to a child--a very rude little child.

He would begin almost every sentence with, "Now tell me something
about India," and would turn aimlessly from one question to the

other without the least continuity. I was not angry, but keenly
interested. The man was a revelation to me. To his questions I

re-turned answers mendacious and evasive. After all, it really
did not matter what I said. He could not understand. I can only

hope and pray that none of the readers of the "Pioneer" will ever
see that portentous interview. The man made me out to be an

idiot several sizes more drivelling than my destiny intended, and
the rankness of his ignorance managed to distort the few poor

facts with which I supplied him into large and elaborate lies.
Then, thought I, "the matter of American journalism shall be

looked into later on. At present I will enjoy myself."
No man rose to tell me what were the lions of the place. No one

volunteered any sort of conveyance. I was absolutely alone in
this big city of white folk. By instinct I sought refreshment,

and came upon a bar-room full of bad Salon pictures in which men
with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a

counter. It was the institution of the "free lunch" I had struck.
You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For

something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself
sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt.

Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts.
Later I began a vast but unsystematic exploration of the streets.

I asked for no names. It was enough that the pavements were full
of white men and women, the streets clanging with traffic, and

that the restful roar of a great city rang in my ears. The cable
cars glided to all points of the compass at once. I took them

one by one till I could go no further. San Francisco has been
pitched down on the sand bunkers of the Bikaneer desert. About

one fourth of it is ground reclaimed from the sea--any old-timers
will tell you all about that. The remainder is just ragged,

unthrifty sand hills, to-day pegged down by houses.
From an English point of view there has not been the least

attempt at grading those hills, and indeed you might as well try
to grade the hillocks of Sind. The cable cars have for all

practical purposes made San Francisco a dead level. They take no
count of rise or fall, but slide equably on their appointed

courses from one end to the other of a six-mile street. They
turn corners almost at right angles, cross other lines, and for

aught I know may run up the sides of houses. There is no visible
agency of their flight, but once in awhile you shall pass a

five-storied building humming with machinery that winds up an
everlasting wire cable, and the initiated will tell you that here

is the mechanism. I gave up asking questions. If it pleases
Providence to make a car run up and down a slit in the ground for

many miles, and if for twopence halfpenny I can ride in that car,
why shall I seek the reasons of the miracle? Rather let me look

out of the windows till the shops give place to thousands and
thousands of little houses made of wood (to imitate stone), each

house just big enough for a man and his family. Let me watch the
people in the cars and try to find out in what manner they differ

from us, their ancestors.
It grieves me now that I cursed them (in the matter of book

piracy), because I perceived that my curse is working and that
their speech is be-coming a horror already. They delude

them-selves into the belief that they talk English--the
English--and I have already been pitied for speaking with "an

English accent." The man who pitied me spoke, so far as I was
concerned, the language of thieves. And they all do. Where we

put the accent forward they throw it back, and vice versa where
we give the long "a" they use the short, and words so simple as

to be past mistaking they pronounce somewhere up in the dome of
their heads. How do these things happen?

Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee school-marm, the cider
and the salt codfish of the Eastern States, are responsible for

what he calls a nasal accent. I know better. They stole books
from across the water without paying for 'em, and the snort of

delight was fixed in their nostrils forever by a just Providence.
That is why they talk a foreign tongue to-day.

"Cats is dogs, and rabbits is dogs, and so's parrots. But this
'ere tortoise is an insect, so there ain't no charge," as the old

porter said.
A Hindoo is a Hindoo and a brother to the man who knows his

vernacular. And a French-man is French because he speaks his own
language. But the American has no language. He is dialect,

slang, provincialism, accent, and so forth. Now that I have
heard their voices, all the beauty of Bret Harte is being ruined

for me, because I find myself catching through the roll of his
rhythmical prose the cadence of his peculiar fatherland. Get an

American lady to read to you "How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's
Bar," and see how much is, under her tongue, left of the beauty

of the original.
But I am sorry for Bret Harte. It happened this way. A reporter

asked me what I thought of the city, and I made answer suavely
that it was hallowed ground to me, because of Bret Harte. That

was true.
"Well," said the reporter, "Bret Harte claims California, but

California don't claim Bret Harte. He's been so long in England
that he's quite English. Have you seen our cracker factories or

the new offices of the 'Examiner'?"
He could not understand that to the outside world the city was

worth a great deal less than the man. I never intended to curse
the people with a provincialism so vast as this.

But let us return to our sheep--which means the sea-lions of the
Cliff House. They are the great show of San Francisco. You take

a train which pulls up the middle of the street (it killed two
people the day before yesterday, being un-braked and driven

absolutelyregardless of consequences), and you pull up somewhere
at the back of the city on the Pacific beach. Originally the

cliffs and their approaches must have been pretty, but they have
been so carefully defiled with advertisements that they are now

one big blistered abomination. A hundred yards from the shore
stood a big rock covered with the carcasses of the sleek

sea-beasts, who roared and rolled and walloped in the spouting
surges. No bold man had painted the creatures sky-blue or

advertised news-papers on their backs, wherefore they did not
match the landscape, which was chiefly hoarding. Some day,

perhaps, whatever sort of government may obtain in this country
will make a restoration of the place and keep it clean and neat.

At present the sovereign people, of whom I have heard so much
already, are vending cherries and painting the virtues of "Little

Bile Beans" all over it.
Night fell over the Pacific, and the white sea-fog whipped

through the streets, dimming the splendors of the electric
lights. It is the use of this city, her men and women folk, to

parade between the hours of eight and ten a certain street called
Cairn Street, where the finest shops are situated. Here the

click of high heels on the pavement is loudest, here the lights
are brightest, and here the thunder of the traffic is most

overwhelming. I watched Young California, and saw that it was,
at least, expensively dressed, cheerful in manner, and

self-asserting in conversation. Also the women were very fair.
Perhaps eighteen days aboard ship had something to do with my

unreserved admiration. The maidens were of generous build,
large, well groomed, and attired in raiment that even to my

inexperienced eyes must have cost much. Cairn Street at nine
o'clock levels all distinctions of rank as impartially as the