So far as I know American cities San Francisco stands out amongst them like some beautiful, fascinating creature who comes suddenly into a roomful of mediocrities. She is radiant, she has charm and allure, those qualities which are gifts of the gods, and which, though we recognize them instantly when we meet them, we are unable to describe. I have not forgotten the charm of Detroit, nor the stupendousness of Chicago, but--there is only one Paris and only one San Francisco. San Francisco does not look at all like Paris, and while it has a large foreign population the people one meets are, for the most part, pure-blooded Americans, yet all the time I was there, I found myself thinking of the place as a city that was somehow foreign. It is full of that splendid vigor which one learns to expect of young American cities; yet it is full of something else--something Latin. The outlook upon life even of its most American inhabitants is touched with a quality that is different. The climate works its will upon them as climate does on people everywhere. Here it makes them lively and spontaneous. They are able to do more (including more sitting up at night) than people do in New York, and it seems to tell upon them less. They love good times and, again owing to the climate, they are able to have them out of doors. The story of the Portola fête, as told me by a San Franciscan, nicely illustrates that, and also shows the San Francisco point of view. "In 1907," he informed me, "we decided to put over a big outdoor New Year's fête, with dancing in the streets, the way they have it in Paris on the Fourteenth of July. But at the last minute it rained and spoiled the outdoor part of the fun. Once in a while, you see, that can happen even in San Francisco. "Everybody agreed that we ought to have a regular established festival, and as we didn't want to have it spoiled a second time, we hunted up the weather records and found that in the history of the city there had never been rain between October seventeenth and twenty-ninth. That established the time for our fête; the next thing was to discover an excuse for it. That was not so easy. After digging through a lot of history we found that Don Caspar de Portola discovered San Francisco Bay October twenty-second, 1679--or maybe it was 1769--that doesn't matter. Nobody had ever heard of Portola until then, but now we have dragged him out of oblivion and made quite a boy of him, all as an excuse to have a good time." "Then you don't celebrate New Year's out here?" I asked. "Don't we though!" he exclaimed. "You ought to be here for our New Year's fête. It is one of the most spontaneous shows of the kind you'll see anywhere. It's not a tough orgy such as you have on Broadway every New Year's Eve, with a lot of drunks sitting around in restaurants under signs saying 'Champagne Only'--I've seen that. We just have a lot of real fun, mostly in the streets.