He always looked neat, with his boots beautifully polished—again gratis—by any bootblack in the town. Many times he came into our store, asked to see some articles of merchandise, looked them over carefully, and selecting what he wanted, said ponderously: “I am the Emperor Norton. I will settle for this when I come into my throne.” No one ever knew where he lived. He never asked to have anything sent home, and his purchases were never extravagant. His imagination was slow when it came to material things, or he may have been sly enough to know just how far to go. If he needed a little small change, he sold, at a discount, beautifully made out drafts on his future exchequer. Many a time I have seen him walk into a restaurant with measured tread—he never hurried. The head waiter would rush up to greet him respectfully. The Emperor would ask: “Is my food ready?” “Right away, Emperor.” He would be seated at the best table and given the best the house afforded. Having finished, he would walk out majestically without paying, of course. The Emperor Norton _never_ got out of his part. This could never have happened in the East. In Concord, Massachusetts, people would have lifted their eyebrows and given him food and raiment as if he were a tramp, but indulged him in his whimsies—never! In New York, those smart society women who send their daughters out upon Fifth Avenue to beg money for various charities would most certainly have had the Emperor Norton put in an institution for the insane. Chapter IV: On Being a Tenderfoot _North of California_ Twenty miles from Water, Thirty miles from Mail, Forty miles from Hell, Girl Wanted—Inquire within. Rudely printed and stuck at a rakish angle upon a tree, hundreds of miles from civilization, or indeed from any visible touch of human habitation, this sign greeted the astonished eyes of the passengers who traveled on the stage line from Redding to Shasta in the north of California in ’75. Leading from it, off into the woods, was a tiny newly trodden path—an invitation that any adventurous young woman could hardly fail to take—had any come that way. But there was the joke—few did. These Westerners made jests of everything, their loneliness and misery in particular, and the characteristic is not dead yet. For just thirty years later, in the city of San Francisco, people forced to rush from their homes by a great conflagration, leaving all their worldly possessions behind them, put up outside their improvised tents and shacks such ridiculous signs as these: Old clothes for sale. Beer, five cents. Fortunes told. Dew Drop Inn. Rooms To Let.