One Sunday in Stinson's Bar

I

"On that broad stage of empire won,
Whose footlights were the setting sun;
Whose flats a distant background rose
In trackless peaks of endless snows;
Here genius bows, and talent waits
To copy that but One creates."

- Bret Harte.



Now-a-days when you want to go from San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada
country you step into your perfectly good Packard (or whatever it is -
all the way down to a motorcycle side car), and you ferry across the bay
and the straits, and if the motor-cop isn't around, you come shooting up
the highway forty miles an hour, and at the end of a glorious five-hour
run you are there.

In the early fifties - when there was less to see, too - you took more
time to it. You came to Sacramento on the river boat. Then if you were
rich, you bought a horse or a mule and rode for the rest of your
journey. If you were poor, or thrifty perhaps, you walked, or tried to
get a ride on one of the ox-freight teams which plied their way across