The year after, he returned to the same place and ordered a bottle of the Burgundy. There was no more left. Some English gentlemen, the host told him, had come on purpose from England to finish it. Now, I am sure some very intelligent man, and a man who was desperately fond of good wine, read the article, and guessed from the description the whereabouts of the little French town and the precious liquid. The moral of this is: “Don’t tell secrets in the newspapers; don’t even tell half a secret.” The evening I left San Francisco, I had a small adventure. I asked a man the way to some street. He told me the way, and then, catching hold of my arm, he said, “You will stand me a drink.” I said I would, and we went into a drinking-saloon. Then he said, “I’m a bum. I was [and he stated his profession], and I’ve been fixed. I’m a booze-fighter.” He added with engaging frankness that he was half drunk. In the course of conversation, it turned out that we had a common friend, and had I not been going off on the train, I would have taken him off to supper. A singular proof of the smallness of the world. Before taking leave of San Francisco, however, I want to say a word or two more. First of all about the clubs. To a man who is used to the staid silence of London clubs, American clubs are exhilarating. I was present, for instance, at a dinner at the Bohemian Club, the “High Jinks Dinner,” which takes place once a year. Every year the members of the club camp out in the redwood region, where the enormous trees grow which you see in pictures, and there, in an amphitheatre formed by these vast topless trunks, they give an open-air opera, written, composed, and played by themselves. Later on, when they come back to the city, they give a dinner in the club, followed by a theatrical entertainment, which is a burlesque on the opera given in the camp: also written, composed, and played by themselves. It was at this dinner I was present, and spontaneous gaiety bubbled from that entertainment like champagne out of a bottle. There was champagne in the concrete also, as well as in the abstract. But the gaiety was more spontaneous and more infectious than I have seen at any, even Bohemian, club in London. I fancy that San Francisco some day will be the great pleasure city of the world: the meeting-place of East and West, owing to its situation, its incomparable climate, its beautiful surroundings, and the microbe of gaiety which is in the air of the place. And then San Francisco is the golden gate which opens on to the enchanted realms of the Pacific. I travelled to New York on the Santa Fé Line, meaning to stop and see the Grand Cañon, but, as it turned out, I had to go right on to Chicago. Writers of American impressions generally deliver themselves of a solemn verdict on the trains, the sleeping-car accommodations, and their merits and demerits. “You won’t like the sleeping-berths,” said an American to me, before I started; “no Englishman ever does.”