Remember that all his life he has gazed on beauty--beauty tragic and haunting, beauty gorgeous and gay. Remember he is accustomed to enormous sizes; superb heights; splendid distances; spacious vistas. That California does not produce an annual crop of megalo-maniacs is the best argument I know for the superiority of heredity over environment. Remember, too, that all his life the Native Son has soaked in an art atmosphere potentially as strong and individual as ancient Greece or renaissance Italy. The dazzling country side, the sulphitic brew of races, the cosmopolitan "city" have taken care of that. That art-spirit accounts for such minor California phenomena as photography raised to unequalled art levels and shops whose simple beautiful interiors resemble the private galleries of art collectors; it accounts for such major phenomena as the Stevenson monument, the "Lark", the annual Grove Play of the Bohemian Club, and the Exposition of 1915. The tiny monument to Stevenson, tucked away in a corner soaked with romantic memories--Portsmouth Square--compares favorably with the charming memorials to the French dead. It is a thing of beautiful proportions. A little stone column supports a bronze ship, its sails bellying robustly to the whip of the Pacific winds. The inscription--a well known quotation from the author--is topped simply by "To remember Robert Louis Stevenson." Perhaps you will object that some of these are not Native Sons. But hush! Californians consider anybody who has stayed five minutes in the State--a real Californian. And believe us, Reader, by that time most of them have become not Californians but Californiacs. The "Lark" is perhaps the most delicious bit of literary fooling that this country has ever produced. It raised its blythe song at the Golden Gate, but it was heard across a whole continent. For two years, Gelett Burgess, Bruce Porter, Porter Garnett, Willis Polk, Ernest Peixotto, and Florence Lundborg performed in it all the artistic antics that their youth, their originality, their high spirits suggested. Professor Norton, speaking to a class at Harvard University, and that the two literary events of the decade between 1890 and 1900 were the fiction of the young Kipling and the verse that appeared in the "Lark."