Naturally the folks in Los Angeles stay up late--they can't figure on doing much sleeping anyhow; but either San Francisco has fewer trolley cars to the acre or else the motormen are not quite so musically inclined, and people may get to bed at a Christian hour. Most of them do it, too, if I am one to judge. At night in San Francisco I didn't see a single owl lunch wagon or meet a single beggar. Newsboys were remarkably scarce and taxicabs seemed to be few and far between. These things help to make any other city; without them San Francisco still manages to be a city--another proof of her individuality. The old romance of the Old San Francisco may be dead and buried--the residents unite in saying that it is, and they ought to know; but, even so, New San Francisco may well brag today of a greater romance than any it ever knew--the romance of achievement. Somebody said not long ago that the greatest of all monuments to American pluck was San Francisco rebuilt; but if there was pluck in it there was romance too. And there is romance, plenty of it, in the exposition these people have planned and are now carrying out to commemorate the opening of the Panama Canal. To begin with, citizens of San Francisco and of the state of California are paying the whole bill themselves--they did not ask the Federal Government to contribute a red cent of the millions being spent and that will be spent, and to date the Federal Government has not contributed a red cent either. Climatic conditions are in their favor. Other expositions have had to contend with hot weather--sometimes with beastly hot weather; those other expositions could not open up until well into the spring, and they closed perforce with the coming of cold weather in the fall. But San Francisco is never very hot and never really cold, and California becomes an out-of-door land as soon as the rains end; so this fair will be actively and continuously in operation for nine months instead of being limited to four or five months as the period of its greatest activities. Then, again, there is another advantage--the exposition grounds are situated well within the city; the site is within easy riding distance of the civic center and not miles away from the middle of town, as has been the case in certain other instances in this country where big expositions were held. It is a place admirably devised by Nature for the purposes to which it is now being put--a six-hundred-acre tract stretching along the water-front, with the Presidio at its farther end, the high hills behind it, and in front of it the exquisite panorama of the Golden Gate, with emerald islands rising beyond; and Berkeley and Oakland just across the way; and on beyond, northward across the narrowing portals of the harbor, the big green mountain of Tamalpais, rising sheer out of the sea.