The proprietor doesn't cut out his portions with a pair of buttonhole scissors, either, or sauce them with a medicine-dropperful of gravy. He gives a big, full, satisfying helping, well cooked and well served. There is some romance in the San Francisco cooking, too, if the oldtimers who bemourn the old days only realized it.
If this seeming officiousness on the part of a passing wayfarer may be excused there is one more suggestion I should like to throw off for the benefit of the promoters of the exposition. Living somewhere in California is a man who should be looked up before the gates are opened, and he should be retained at a salary and staked out in suitable quarters as a special and added attraction. He is the most magnificent fish-liar in the known world! I do not know his name—he was so busy pouring fish stories down a party of us that he didn't take time to stop and tell his name—but no great difficulty should be experienced in finding him. There is only one of him alive—these world's wonders never occur in pairs. That would cheapen them and make them commonplace.
He swam into our ken—if a mixed metaphor may be pardoned—on a train leaving Oakland for the East. We were sitting in the club car—half a dozen or so of us—when he drifted along. At first look no one would have suspected him of being so gifted a creature as he proved himself to be. He was a round, short, tub-shaped man, with a button nose, and a double chin that ran all the way round and lapped over at the back. But, though his appearance was deceiving, anybody could tell with half an eye that he excelled in extemporaneous conversation. Right off he began shadow-boxing and sparring about, waiting for an opening. In a minute he got it.
The tall man with the long face and the stiff white pompadour, who looked like a patent toothbrush, gave him his chance. The tall man happened to look out of the car window and see in an inlet a fleet of beached fishing boats, and he remarked on their picturesqueness. That was the cue.
"Speaking of fishing," said the button-nosed man, "I'll tell you people something that'll maybe interest you. You may not believe it, either, me being a stranger to you; but it's the Gospel truth or I wouldn't be sitting here a-telling it. I reckon I've done more fishing in my day and more different kinds of fishing than any man alive. I come originally from a prime fishing state—Michigan—and I've lived in Colorado and Montana and Oregon and all the other good fishing states out West. But, take it from me, friends, California is the best fishing state there is. Yes, sir; when it comes to fishing, old California lays it over 'em all—she takes the rag right off the bush! I'm the one that oughter know because I've fished her from end to end and crossways—sea fishing, creek fishing, lake fishing and all.
"Down at Catalina they'll tell you, if you ask 'em, that I'm the man that ketched the biggest tuna that ever come out of that ocean. It took me fourteen hours and forty-five minutes to land him, and during that time he towed me and an eighteen-foot boat, and the fellow I had along for boatman, over forty-four miles—I measured it afterward to be sure—and the friction of the reel spinning round wore my line down till it wasn't no thicker in places than a cobweb. But tunas ain't my regular specialty—trouts and basses are my special favorites; and up in the mountains is where I mostly do my fishing.
"I'm just sort of hanging round now waiting for the snow to move out so's I can go up there and start fishing.
"Well, sirs, it's funny, ain't it, the way luck will run fishing? Oncet when I was living up there I fished stiddy, day in and day out, for two seasons and never got a bite that you could rightly call a bite. And then all of a sudden one afternoon the luck switched and in exactly forty-five minutes by the watch—by this here very watch I'm carrying now in my pocket—I ketched seventy-two of them big old black basses out of one hole; and they averaged five pounds apiece!"
We looked at one another silently. A total of seventy-two five-pound bass in three-quarters of an hour seemed a little too much to be taken as a first dose from a strange practitioner. And it was hard to believe they had all been basses; if only for the sake of variety there should have been at least one barytone. We felt that we needed time for reflection—and digestion.
Evidently realizing this, one of our number undertook to throw himself into the breach. As I recollect, this volunteer was the fat coffin drummer from Des Moines who had the round, smooth face and the round, bald head, and wore the fuzzy green hat with the bow at the back. I think he wore the bow there purposely—it simplified matters so when you were trying to decide which side of his head his face grew on. He heaved a pensive sigh out of his system and remarked upon the clearness of the air in these parts.