vitality, the courage and enterprise of a people who, before a half
decade had passed, had eliminated almost every trace of the greatest
disaster of modern time.

Perhaps, after the beauty of its situation, the stranger is most struck
with the picturesqueness given to the city by its cosmopolitan
atmosphere. For San Francisco, serving as one of the two main great
gateways to an enormous country, a front entrance to America from the
Orient, a back entrance from Europe and a side entrance from South
America, standing halfway between tropics and polar regions, a great
port of the greatest ocean in the world, becomes naturally one of the
world's main caravanseries, a meeting place of nations.

Chinatown is not far off from the heart of the city. And Chinatown
pervades San Francisco. It is as though it distilled some faint oriental
perfume with which constantly it suffuses the air. You meet the Chinese
everywhere. The men differ in no wise from the men with whom the smaller
Chinatowns of the East have acquainted us. The women make the streets
exotic. Little, slim-limbed creatures, amber-skinned, jewel-eyed,
dressed in silk of black or pastel colors, loosely coated and
comfortably trousered, their jet-black shining hair filled with
ornaments, they go about in groups which include old women and young
matrons, half-grown girls slender as forsythia branches, babies arrayed
like princes. You are likely to meet groups of Hindus, picturesquely
turbaned, coffee-brown in color, slight-figured, straight-featured,
black-bearded. You see Japanese and Filipinos. And as for Latins -
French, Italians and Spanish flood the city. There are eight thousand
Montenegrins alone in California. I never suspected there were eight
thousand in Montenegro. And our own continent contributes Canadians,
Mexicans, citizens from every State in the Union. In addition, you run