Hospitality was nearly a vice. As in the early mining days, if they liked the stranger the people took him in. At the first meeting the San Francisco man had him put up at the club; at the second, he invited him home to dinner. As long as the stranger stayed he was being invited to week end parties at ranches, to little dinners in this or that restaurant and to the houses of his new acquaintances, until his engagements grew beyond hope of fulfilment. Perhaps there was rather too much of this kind of thing. At the end of a fortnight a visitor with a pleasant smile and a good story left the place a wreck. This tendency ran through all grades of society--except, perhaps, the sporting people who kept the tracks and the fighting game alive. These also met the stranger--and also took him in. Centres of man hospitality were the clubs, especially the famous Bohemian and the Family. The latter was an offshot of the Bohemian; and it had been growing fast and vieing with the older organization for the honor of entertaining pleasing and distinguished visitors. The Bohemian Club, whose real founder is said to have been the late Henry George, was formed in the '70s by newspaper writers and men working in the arts or interested in them. It had grown to a membership of 750. It still kept for its nucleus painters, writers, musicians and actors, amateur and professional. They were a gay group of men, and hospitality was their avocation. Yet the thing which set this club off from all others in the world was the midsummer High Jinks. The club owns a fine tract of redwood forest fifty miles north of San Francisco on the Russian River. There are two varieties of big trees in California: the Sequoia gigantea and the Sequoia sempervirens. The great trees of the Mariposa grove belong to the gigantea species. The sempervirens, however, reaches the diameter of 16 feet, and some of the greatest trees of this species are in the Bohemian Club grove. It lies in a cleft of the mountains: and up one hillside there runs a natural out of doors stage of remarkable acoustic properties. In August the whole Bohemian Club, or such as could get away from business, went up to this grove and camped out for two weeks. On the last night they put on the Jinks proper, a great spectacle in praise of the forest with poetic words, music and effects done by the club. In late years this has been practically a masque or an opera. It cost about $10,000. It took the spare time of scores of men for weeks; yet these 750 business men, professional men, artists, newspaper workers, struggled for the honor of helping out on the Jinks; and the whole thing was done naturally and with reverence. It would not be possible anywhere else in this country; the thing which made it possible was the art spirit which is in the Californian. It runs in the blood.