"In Los Angeles, now, it is different. The lady that you take out upon your arm there is probably from Davenport or Kokomo or Indianapolis, whether she will admit it or not. Los Angeles is western. We are not. We are 'the Coast' and be exceeding careful, young man, how you say it." He has spoken the truth. Your typical San Franciscan is quite as well versed in the streets and shops and hotels of London, Paris and Vienna, as your typical New Yorker or Bostonian. The four days bridging across the North American continent is no more to him than the Hudson river ferries to the commuter from New Jersey. His city is cosmopolitan--and he is proud of it. Her streets are cosmopolitan and so are her shops and her great hotels. To the stately Palace reared from the site of the old, and with a new glass-covered court rivaling the glories of its predecessor, still come princes and diplomats, globe-trotters of every sort and bearing in their train wondrous luggage of every sort, prosperous miners from the North, bankers from the East, Californians from every corner of their great state, and look with curious interest at the elect of San Francisco sipping their high tea there in the court yard. And the cosmopolitanism of the streets is still more marked. Portuguese, Italian, sour-doughs from Alaska, hundreds of the little brown Japs who are giving California such a tremendous worry these days, Indians, French Kanakas, Mexicans, Chinese--the list might be run almost interminably. Of these none are more interesting than the Chinese. You see them in all the downtown quarters of San Francisco--the men with that inscrutable gravity and sagacity that long centuries of civilization seem to have given them, the women and the little girls, of high caste or low, invariably hatless and wearing loose coat and trousers--in many cases of brilliant colors and rare Oriental silks. And when you come to their own city within a city--San Francisco's famous Chinatown--they are the dominant folk upon the street. Of course the new Chinatown is not the old--with its subterranean labyrinths of unspeakable vileness and dirt, with danger and crime lurking in each of its dark corners. That passed completely in the fire. But it had begun to pass even before that great calamity. It was being exploited. Paid guides, with a keen sense of the theatrical, were beginning to work the damage. The "rubberneck wagons" were multiplying.