Clytie accepted the diversion, evidently only too glad to change the subject. "What collection?" she asked. "My San Francisco Improbabilities. I’ve got a note-book full of them—things no sane Easterner would believe possible, and no novelist dare to use in fiction." "Oh, yes, I remember your telling me. What are they? One was that house made entirely of doors, wasn’t it?" "Yes, the ’house of one hundred and eighty doors’ at the foot of Ninth Street. Then, there is the hulk of the _Orizaba_ over by the Union Iron Works, where ’Frank the Frenchman’ lives like a hermit, eats swill and bathes in the sewage of the harbor. Then there’s ’Munson’s Mystery’ on the North beach—nobody has ever found out who Munson is. And Dailey, the star eater of the Palace Hotel—he used to have four canvas-back ducks cooked, selected one and used only the juice from the others; he ordered soup at a dollar a plate; and he had a happy way of buying a case of champagne with each meal, drinking only the top glass from each bottle." Clytie laughed now, for Cayley was in one of his most amusing and enthusiastic moods. "Do you remember that tramp who lived all summer in the Hensler vault in Calvary Cemetery?" "Yes, but that isn’t so impossible as Kruger’s castle out in the sand-hills by Tenth Avenue. It’s a perfect jumble of job-lot buildings from the Mid-winter Fair, like a nightmare palace. I went out there once and saw old Mother Kruger, so tortured with rheumatism that she had to crawl round on her hands and knees. She had only one tooth left. The old man is one of the last of the wood-engravers and calls himself the Emperor of the Nations. He has resurrected Hannibal and an army of two hundred thousand men; also he revived Pompeii for three days. He wanted to bring Mayor Sutro back to life for me, but I wouldn’t stand for it." Cayley swept on with his anecdotes. "Who would believe the story of ’Big Bertha,’ who buncoed all the swellest Hebrews in town, and ended by playing Mazeppa in tights at the Bella Union Theater? Who has written the true story of Dennis Kearney, the hack-driver, who had his speeches written for him by reporters, and went East with a big head, unconsciously to plagiarize Wendell Phillips in Fanueil Hall? Or of ’Mammy’ Pleasant, the old negress who had such mysterious influence over so many millionaires—who couldn’t be bribed—who died at last, with all her secrets untold? There’s Romance in purple letters! "What do you think of a first folio Shakespeare, the rent-roll of Stratford parish, and a collection of Incunabula worth thirty thousand dollars, kept in the deserted library on Montgomery Street in a case, by Jove, without a lock! What’s the matter with Little Pete, the Chinaman, jobbing all the race-tracks in California? Who’d believe that there are streets here, within a mile of Lotta’s fountain, so steep that they pasture cows on the grass?"