blank, house number blank, on your street," said Central. "Will you
please go over there at once?" He went. Somehow he got into the house.
Nobody answered his ring at the apartment; he had to break the door
open. Inside a very beautiful girl in a gay negligee was lying dead on a
couch, a bottle of poison on the floor beside her. He investigated the
case. The dead girl had been in the habit of calling a certain number,
and she always used a curious identifying code-phrase. The reporter
investigated that number. The rest of the story is long and thrilling,
but finally he ran down a group of lawbreakers who had been selling the
dead girl drugs, were indirectly responsible for her suicide. Do you
suppose such a ripe story could have dropped straight from the Tree of
Life into the hand of a reporter anywhere except in California?

A woman I know was once waiting on the corner for a car. Near, she
happened casually to notice, was a Chinaman of a noticeable, dried
antiquity, shuffling along under the weight of a bunch of bananas. She
was at that moment considering a curious mental problem and, in her
preoccupation, she drew her hand down the length of her face in a
gesture that her friends recognize as characteristic. Did she, by
accident, stumble on one of the secret signals of a great secret
traffic? That is her only explanation of what followed. For suddenly the
old Chinaman shuffled to her side, unobtrusively turned his back towards
her. One of the bananas on top the bunch, easy to the reach of her hand,
was opened, displaying itself to be emptied of fruit. But in its place
was something - something little, wrapped in tissue paper. Her complete
astonishment apparently warned the vendor of drugs of his mistake. He
scuttled across the street; in a flash had vanished in a back alley.

One could go on forever. I cannot forbear another. A woman was passing
through the theatrical district of San Francisco one night, just before