I’d had time to think, and this was the way it looked: Where the broad Pacific blends with the land of freedom and railway prospecti, the Mistress of the Pacific dreams among her hills. Beneath her shades lie two universities with building plans and endowments. It occurred to me that I’d better make two packages of my money. One of nine hundred was to get me out to San Francisco and show me the town in a manner befitting my birth and station. The other was to transport me like a dream through one of the aforesaid universities on a thousand a year, showing the co-eds what football was like. With my diplomas and press notices tucked under my arm, I would then report at the residence of James Wiswell Coffin 2d, at South Framingham, and receive a father’s blessing. By the time I’d landed at this Midway Plaisance and bought a few rags, the small package looked something like four hundred dollars. It was at this stage of the game that I met the woman starring as the villainess in this weird tale. We went out to the Emeryville track together. All of my four hundred that I didn’t pay for incidentals I lost the first day out. But that makes no never mind, says I to myself; it’s easy to go through a California university on seven-fifty per, and besides, a college course ought to be three years instead of four. So I dipped into the big pile. Let us drop the quick curtain. When it rises I am centre stage in the Palace Hotel, ninety-dollar overcoats and pin-checked cutaways to right and left, katzenjammer R. U. E., a week’s board-bill hovering in the flies above me—and strapped. I gets up, puts my dress-suit into its case, tucks in a sweater and a bunch of ties, tells the clerk that I am going away for a day or so, and will leave my baggage until I can come back and settle, and walks into the cold, wet world. The dress-suit brought eight dollars. That fed me and slept me in a little room on Third Street for a week. After dragging the ties through every pawn-shop from Tar Flat to the Iron Works, I got a dollar for them. They cost twenty. Next was the suit-case—two and a half. The third day after that I had dropped the last cent, and was leaving my lodgings two jumps ahead of the landlord, a great coarse Swede. I hadn’t a thing but the clothes on my back. In a vacant basement of a house on Folsom Street I found a front step invisible to the naked eye of the cop on the beat. There I took lodgings. I got two meals by trading my trousers for a cheaper pair and twenty cents to boot from the Yiddish man in the shop above. When that was gone I roamed this grand old city for four days and three nights, and never did such a vulgar thing as eat. That’s no Child’s Dream of a Star.