It has been my experience that romance is always in the past tense anyhow. Romance is a commodity that was extremely plentiful last week or last year or last century, but for the moment they are entirely out of it, and can't say with any degree of certainty when a fresh stock will be coming in. This is largely true of all the formerly romantic cities I know anything about, and it appears to be especially true of San Francisco. Romance invariably acquires added value after it has vanished; in this respect it is very much like a history-making epoch. An epoch rarely seems to create any great amount of excitement when it is in process of epoching, or at least the excitement is only temporary and soon abates. Afterward we look back upon it with a feeling of longing, but when it was actually coming to pass we took it--after the first shock of surprise--as a matter of course. No doubt our children and our children's children will read in the text-books that the first decade of the twentieth century was distinguished as the age when the auto and tango came into use, and people learned to fly, and grown men wore bracelet watches and carried their handkerchiefs up their cuffs; and they will repine because they, too, did not live in those stirring times. But we of the present generation who recently passed through these experiences have already accepted them without undue excitement, just as our forefathers in their day accepted the submarine cable, the galvanic battery and the congress gaiter. [Illustration: EVEN THE PLACE WHERE THE TURKEY TROT ORIGINATED WAS TROTLESS AND QUIET] Age and antiquity give an added value to everything except an egg. In my own case I know how it was with regard to the Egyptian scarab. For years I felt that I could never rest satisfied until I had gone to Egypt and had personally broken into the tomb of some sleeping Pharaoh or some crumbly old Rameses, and with my own hands had ravished from it a mummified specimen of that fabled beetle which the ancients worshiped and buried with them in their tombs. But not long ago I made the discovery that, in coloring, habits, customs and general walk and conversation, the scarab of the Egyptians was none other than the common tumblebug of the Southern dirt roads. Right there was where I lost interest in the scarab. He was no novelty to me--not after that he wasn't. As a boy I had known him intimately.