Another day, we visited the Presidio, and rejoiced to see the blue uniform of Uncle Sam after the many weeks of red coats upon the Yukon. Say what you may, it quickens the blood to catch a glimpse of our boys in blue. I well remember how good it seemed when we met them in command of the fortress of El Moro, at Havana, two years ago.
We also spent a night in Chinatown—or part of the night—for we were bound to see its horrors and its joys. The opium dens—a picture of Hop Sing and his cat, the beast also a victim of the habit—I bring home to you; the theatre, where the audience and the actors were equally interesting; the Joss house or temple; the lady with the tiny feet, one of whose midget shoes I took off and have to show you; the barber shop where they shave the head and scrape out the ears and nose; the many handsome shops and almost priceless curios; and the swarms of bright-eyed, laughing, friendly, gentle children.
A BIG REDWOOD.
While the Chinese upon the Pacific Coast, and in San Francisco more particularly, have been greatly lessened in number the last few years, it is interesting to note how many of the more progressive Japanese are now to be seen in all of the great cities along the Pacific coast. In Vancouver, all of the bell boys and elevator boys in the large Hotel Vancouver were bright-eyed Japs. Keen, intelligent, wide-awake little fellows, speaking good English, dressed in American style, and seeming to know their business perfectly. We saw them at Seattle and Tacoma and Portland, and now we find them in large numbers in San Francisco. They get along well with the white man. They dress like him, eat like him, walk like him, and try to look as much like him as possible. They seek employment as servants, as day laborers, and are also getting extensively into trade in a small way. They keep prices up like a white man and join labor unions like the white man, and sympathetically act with him to a degree that eliminates the prejudice that hedges in and drives out the Chinaman. The Japanese seem to supply a genuine want in the Pacific slope. I learned, also, that Japanese capital is now coming into California and making substantial investments, the expenditure of their money giving employment to American white labor.
Coming down the Sacramento Valley the other day, I noticed that all the labor gangs employed by the Southern Pacific Railroad were Greeks, dull-looking Greeks who could speak no English. It seemed to me as I looked into their semi-Oriental faces, that they gave less promise of satisfactory American citizenship than did the up-to-date, alert, intelligent Japanese. The one represented a semi-Oriental country, whose greatness was destroyed by Rome two thousand years ago; the other expressed the awakened intelligence of the new Orient, the new Japan whose great modern navy to-day ranks first upon the Pacific.
That night when we first crossed the bay toward the long line of glittering city, the tall Norwegian said to me: “I have sailed all about this world and visited many cities, but San Francisco suits me the very best of them all.” And his black-eyed Tartar wife from Moscow exclaimed: “Ah, I will never leave here till I die.” All who visit San Francisco feel this subtle charm. There is a certain something in the air that soothes as well as stirs. Its lawns and flowers where water is applied; its sunshine, never too hot, for it is tempered by the breezes from the sea; no winter, rarely a dash of snow; no torrid sun; an atmosphere almost gentle, yet not destroying energy.
Leaving San Francisco, we took the little narrow-gauge railway that leads out south of the city, skirts the bay and climbs the Coast Range through the famous grove of immense redwood trees that comes down to the sea at Santa Cruz. A pretty village among gardens and orchards of prunes and apricots and almonds, famous for its flowers and its fish. On the long pier we watched the Italian fishermen mending their nets and loading them into their lateen-sailed boats. Here the rainbow-hued Barroda is caught in the deep sea and shipped to the city; while, sitting all along the pier, were old folks and young catching smelts with hook and line. An old man with long, white beard said to me, as he took off a smelt and put it in his creel, “If a man has nothing to do but just to live, this is the most salubrious spot along this coast. I’ve tried them all.”