I thought that this wasn’t a bad place to change the subject, so I asked him to have a drink, and switched off on to purely local topics. We crossed the big bridge over the Sacramento river, stopped a few minutes in Sacramento City, and then rolled on to Porta Costa station. I have heard people say that they have gone from New York to San Francisco by rail. This is one of those sayings which are wanting in certain qualifications of fact to make them unimpeachable. It is nearly true, but not quite. The train, weighing I am afraid to say how many tons, ran into Porta Costa, which is a sort of detachable depôt on the estuary of the Sacramento river. When it stopped I got out of the car to have a look round. There was a “local” and a freight train lying alongside of us. There was also a vast superstructure running over the station, and in these I noticed two huge engine-beams slowly swinging. Shortly after this I became aware of the fact that this piece of the depôt had gone adrift, and was, calmly and without any perceptible motion, carrying our train and the two others across the river to the depôt on the Oakland side. I had been four and a half days in America and so I didn’t feel surprised. All the same, it was sufficiently wonderful for admiration even there. I climbed back into the car and enjoyed the sensation of travelling by rail and sea at the same time, and then I got out again to see how the thing was done. The piece of the Porta Costa station on which we were floating steered into another station. The rails on the steam-driven platform were fitted on to other rails on _terra firma_; the engine-bell clanged; the whistle tooted in its soft, melodious way; and the Overland Limited steamed from sea to land in the most commonplace fashion possible. The next stop was at Oakland, on the eastern shore of the bay. Opposite glittered the lights of the Golden City. Here we detrained, and, having crossed on the biggest ferry in the world, we embarked on the biggest ferry-boat in the world—California, like the rest of the States, is great on big things—and an hour or so later I found myself installed at the Palace Hotel, which is also believed by all good Californians to be the biggest hotel in the world. III _THE QUEEN OF THE GOLDEN STATE_ (FROM A GUIDE-BOOK—WITH ANNOTATIONS AND AN IMPRESSION OF CHINATOWN) “Serene, indifferent to Fate, Thou sittest at the Western Gate.” San Francisco—no well-bred American, unless he comes from Chicago, ever says ’Frisco—is a delicious combination of wealth and wickedness, splendour and squalor, vice, virtue, villainy, beauty, ugliness, solitude and silence, rush and row—in short, San Francisco is just San Francisco, and that’s all there is to it, as they say there. It was discovered and settled by Franciscan friars. It would be no place for them now. It is also quite a considerable city as to size. This is what the local guide-book says: