And there is a moral in that which the San Franciscan speaks. In the twinkling of an eye the old San Francisco disappeared--forever. Slowly, but surely, the old New Orleans is beginning to fade away. There are indubitable signs of this already. When it shall have gone, our last stronghold of old French customs and manners shall have gone. One of the most fascinating chapters in the story of our Southland will have been closed. 16 THE CITY OF THE LITTLE SQUARES In after years, you will like to think of it as the City of the Little Squares. After all the other memories of San Antonio are gone--the narrow streets twisting and turning their tortuous ways through the very heart of the old town, the missions strung out along the Concepcion road like faded and broken bits of bric-a-brac, the brave and militant show of arsenal and fort--then shall the fragrance of those open plazas long remain. The Military Plaza, with its great bulk of a City Hall facing it, the Main Plaza, where the grave towers of the little cathedral look down upon the palm-trees and the beggars, the newer, open squares--always plazas in San Antonio--and then, best of all, the Alamo Plaza, with that squat namesake structure facing it--_the_ lion of a town of many lions. These open places are the distinctive features of the oldest and the best of the Texas towns. They lend to it the Latin air that renders it different from most other cities in America. They help to make San Antonio seem far more like Europe than America. [Illustration: One of the little squares--and the big cathedral--San Antonio] To this old town come the Texans, always in great numbers for it is their great magnet--the focusing point that has drawn them and before them, their fathers, their grandfathers and their great-grandfathers--far reaching generations of Texans who have gone before. For here is the distinct play-ground of the Lone Star State. Its other cities are attractive enough in their several ways, but at the best their fame is distinctly commercial--Fort Worth as a packing-house town, Dallas as a distributing point for great wholesale enterprises, Houston as a banking center, Galveston as the great water-gate of Texas and the second greatest ocean port of the whole land. San Antonio is none of these things. While the last census showed her to be the largest of all Texas cities in point of population, it is said by her jealous rivals and it probably is true, that nearly half of that population is composed of Mexicans; and here is a part of our blessed land where the Mexican, like his dollar, must be accepted at far less than his nominal value.