Small wonder that the Californian loves to talk about his climate. He loves to discuss it for the same reason the New Yorker loves to discuss money: because, with him, it is the fundamental thing. All through the West, but particularly on the Pacific Coast, men and women alike lead outdoor lives, compared with which the outdoor lives of Easterners are labored and pathetic. The man or woman in California who does not know what it is to ride and camp and shoot is an anomaly. Apropos of this love of outdoors, I am reminded that the head of a large department store informed me that, in San Francisco, rainy days bring out the largest shopping crowds, because people like to spend the sunny ones in the open. Also, I noticed for myself, that small shopkeepers think so much of the climate that in many instances they cannot bear to bar it out, even at night, but have permanent screen fronts in their stores. All the year round, flowers are for sale at stands on corners, in the San Francisco streets, and if you think we have no _genre_ in America, if you think there is nothing in this country to compare with your memories of picturesque little scenes in Europe--scenes involving such things as the dog-drawn wagons of Belgium; Dutch girls in wooden shoes, bending at the waist to scrub a sidewalk; embroidered peasants at a Breton pardon; proud beggars at an Andalusian railway station; mysterious hooded Arabs at Gibraltar; street singers in Naples; flower girls in the costume of the _campagna_, at the Spanish Steps in Rome--if you think we cannot match such bits of color, then you should see the flower stands of San Francisco upon some holiday, when Chinese girls are bargaining for blooms. But I am talking only of this one part of California. When one considers the whole State, one is forced to admit that it is a natural wonder-place. It is everything. In its ore-filled mountains it is Alaska; to the south it is South America; I have looked out of a train window and seen a perfect English park, only to realize suddenly that it had not been made by gardeners, but was the sublimated landscape gardening which Nature gave to this state of states. I have eaten Parisian meals in San Francisco and drunk splendid wines, and afterwards I have been told that our viands and beverages had, without exception, been produced in California--unless one counts the gin in the cocktail which preceded dinner. But that is only part of it. With her hills San Francisco is Rome; with her harbor she is Naples; with her hotels she is New York. But with her clubs and her people she is San Francisco--which, to my mind, comes near being the apotheosis of praise.