San Francisco has its Court of Miracles too. It is a far cry thither, for it lies on the other side of Chinatown and Dagotown, and blocks beyond Luna’s restaurant. It is in the valley between Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill, and you must pass through it as you go down to Meigg’s Wharf where the Government tugs tie up. One has elected to call it the Court of Miracles, but it is not a court, and the days of miracles are over. It is a row of seven two-story houses, one of them brick. The brick house is over a saloon kept by a Kanaka woman and called "The Eiffel Tower." Here San Francisco’s beggars live and have their being. That is, a good many of them. The doubled-up old man with the white beard and neck-handkerchief who used to play upon a zither and the sympathies of the public on the corner of Sutter street has moved out, and one can find no trace of him, and Father Elphick, the white-headed vegetarian of Lotta’s Fountain, is dead. But plenty of the others are left. The neatly dressed fellow with dark blue spectacles, who sings the _Marseillaise_, accompanying himself upon an infinitesimal hand organ, is here; Mrs. McCleaverty is here, and the old bare-headed man who sits on the street corner by the Bohemian Club, after six o’clock in the evening and turns the crank of a soundless organ, has here set up his everlasting rest. The beggars of the Seven Houses are genuine miserables. Perhaps they have an organisation and a president, I don’t know. But I do know that Leander and I came very near demoralising the whole lot of them. More strictly speaking, it was Leander who did the deed, I merely looked on and laughed, but Leander says that by laughing I lent him my immoral support, and am therefore party to the act. Leander and I had been dining at the "Red House," which is a wine-shop that Gelett Burgess discovered in an alley not far from the county jail. Leander and I had gone there because we like to sit at its whittled tables and drink its _Vin Ordinaire_ (très ordinaire) out of tin gill measures; also we like its salad and its thick slices of bread that you eat after you have rubbed them with an onion or a bit of garlic. We always go there in evening dress in order to impress the Proletariat. On this occasion after we had dined and had come out again into the gas and gaiety of the Mexican quarter we caromed suddenly against Cluness. Cluness is connected with some sort of a charitable institution that has a house somewhere in the "Quarter." He says that he likes to alleviate distress wherever he sees it; and that after all, the best thing in life is to make some poor fellow happy for a few moments.