III
THE QUEEN OF THE GOLDEN STATE
(From a Guide-book—with Annotations and an Impression of Chinatown)
“Serene, indifferent to Fate,
Thou sittest at the Western Gate.”
San Francisco—no well-bred American, unless he comes from Chicago, ever says ’Frisco—is a delicious combination of wealth and wickedness, splendour and squalor, vice, virtue, villainy, beauty, ugliness, solitude and silence, rush and row—in short, San Francisco is just San Francisco, and that’s all there is to it, as they say there. It was discovered and settled by Franciscan friars. It would be no place for them now.
It is also quite a considerable city as to size. This is what the local guide-book says:
“It is bounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean, on the north by Golden Gate Strait and the Bay of San Francisco, on the east by the bay, and on the south by San Mateo County.”
One would naturally expect a city bounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean to have a considerable water frontage, some nine thousand miles, in fact. This, however, is not quite the case; it is only the American guide-booker’s way of putting it.