The first time I visited San Francisco shortly after the fire, I was walking one day in rather a lonely part of the city. There were many burnt areas about: only a few pedestrians. Presently, I saw a man and woman leaning against a fence, absorbed in conversation. Apparently they did not hear my approach; they were too deep in talk. They did not look out of the ordinary and, indeed, I should not have given them a second glance if, as I passed, I had not heard the woman say, "And did you kill anyone else?" A man told me that once early in the morning he was walking through Chinatown. There was nobody else on the street except, a little distance ahead, a child carrying a small bundle. Suddenly just as she passed, a panel in one of the houses slid open... a hand came out... the child slipped the bundle into the hand... the hand disappeared... the wall panel closed up. The child trotted on as though nothing had happened... disappeared around the corner. When my friend reached the house, it was impossible to locate the panel. A reporter I know was leaving his home one morning when there came a ring at his telephone. "There is something wrong in apartment number blank, house number blank, on your street," said Central. "Will you please go over there at once?" He went. Somehow he got into the house. Nobody answered his ring at the apartment; he had to break the door open. Inside a very beautiful girl in a gay negligee was lying dead on a couch, a bottle of poison on the floor beside her. He investigated the case. The dead girl had been in the habit of calling a certain number, and she always used a curious identifying code-phrase. The reporter investigated that number. The rest of the story is long and thrilling, but finally he ran down a group of lawbreakers who had been selling the dead girl drugs, were indirectly responsible for her suicide. Do you suppose such a ripe story could have dropped straight from the Tree of Life into the hand of a reporter anywhere except in California? A woman I know was once waiting on the corner for a car. Near, she happened casually to notice, was a Chinaman of a noticeable, dried antiquity, shuffling along under the weight of a bunch of bananas. She was at that moment considering a curious mental problem and, in her preoccupation, she drew her hand down the length of her face in a gesture that her friends recognize as characteristic. Did she, by accident, stumble on one of the secret signals of a great secret traffic? That is her only explanation of what followed. For suddenly the old Chinaman shuffled to her side, unobtrusively turned his back towards her. One of the bananas on top the bunch, easy to the reach of her hand, was opened, displaying itself to be emptied of fruit. But in its place was something--something little, wrapped in tissue paper. Her complete astonishment apparently warned the vendor of drugs of his mistake. He scuttled across the street; in a flash had vanished in a back alley.