feared by a whole city; and if I was disappointed, in my character of
looker-on, to have the matter end ingloriously without the firing of a
shot or the hanging of a single millionnaire, philosophy tried to tell
me that this sight was truly the more picturesque. In a thousand towns
and different epochs I might have had occasion to behold the cowardice
and carnage of street fighting; where else, but only there and then,
could I have enjoyed a view of Coleman (the intermittent despot) walking
meditatively up hill in a quiet part of town, with a very rolling gait,
and slapping gently his great thigh?
Minora Canamus. This historic figure stalks silently through a corner
of the San Francisco of my memory: the rest is bric-a-brac, the
reminiscences of a vagrant sketcher. My delight was much in slums.
Little Italy was a haunt of mine; there I would look in at the windows
of small eating-shops, transported bodily from Genoa or Naples, with
their macaroni, and chianti flasks, and portraits of Garibaldi, and
coloured political caricatures; or (entering in) hold high debate with
some ear-ringed fisher of the bay as to the designs of “Mr. Owstria” and
“Mr. Rooshia.” I was often to be observed (had there been any to observe
me) in that dis-peopled, hill-side solitude of Little Mexico, with its
crazy wooden houses, endless crazy wooden stairs, and perilous mountain
goat-paths in the sand. Chinatown by a thousand eccentricities drew
and held me; I could never have enough of its ambiguous, interracial
atmosphere, as of a vitalised museum; never wonder enough at its
outlandish, necromantic-looking vegetables set forth to sell in
commonplace American shop-windows, its temple doors open and the scent
of the joss-stick streaming forth on the American air, its kites of
Oriental fashion hanging fouled in Western telegraph-wires, its flights
of paper prayers which the trade-wind hunts and dissipates along
Western gutters. I was a frequent wanderer on North Beach, gazing at
the straits, and the huge Cape-Horners creeping out to sea, and imminent
Tamalpais. Thence, on my homeward way, I might visit that strange and
filthy shed, earth-paved and walled with the cages of wild animals and
birds, where at a ramshackle counter, amid the yells of monkeys, and a
poignant atmosphere of menagerie, forty-rod whiskey was administered by
a proprietor as dirty as his beasts. Nor did I even neglect Nob
Hill, which is itself a kind of slum, being the habitat of the mere
millionnaire. There they dwell upon the hill-top, high raised above
man's clamour, and the trade-wind blows between their palaces about
deserted streets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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