clerk who can speak good English, but if you cannot either of the Costa
brothers will be glad to show you the courtesy of answering your
questions.

Turn around and look at the shelves filled with bottles of wine. Now you
feel that you are on safe ground, for you know about wines and can talk
about Cresta Blanca, and Mont Rouge, and Asti Colony Tipo Chianti. But
wait a minute. Here are labels that you do not understand and wines that
you never even heard of. Here are wines whose taste is so delicious that
you wonder why it is the whole world is not talking about it and
drinking it.

Here are wines from the slopes of Aetna, sparkling and sweet. Here are
wines from grapes grown on the warm slopes of Vesuvius, and brought to
early perfection by the underground fires. Here are wines from the
colder slopes of mountains; wines from Parma and from Sicily and Palermo
where the warm Italian sunshine has been the arch-chemist to bring
perfection to the fruit of the vine. Here are still wines and those that
sparkle. Here the famed Lacrima Christi, both spumanti and fresco, said
to be the finest wine made in all Italy, and the spumanti have the
unusual quality for an Italian wine of being dry. But to tell you of all
the interesting articles to be found in these Italian, and French and
Mexican stores, would be impossible, for some of them have not been
translated into English, and even the storekeepers would be at a loss
for words to explain them.

This is all a part of the Bohemianism of San Francisco, and that is why
we are telling you about it in a book that is supposed to be devoted to
the Bohemian restaurants. The fact is that San Francisco's Bohemian
restaurants would be far less interesting were it not for the fact that