you.

All this picturesqueness, beauty and charm form the raw materials of the
most entertaining city life in the country. For whatever San Francisco
is or is not, it is never dull. Life there is in a perpetual ferment. It
is as though the city kettle had been set on the stove to boil half a
century ago and had never been taken off. The steam is pouring out of
the nose. The cover is dancing up and down. The very kettle is rocking
and jumping. But by some miracle the destructive explosion never
happens. The Californian is easy-going in a sense and yet he works hard
and plays hard. Athletics are feverish there, suffrage rampant, politics
frenzied, labor militant. Would that I had space here to dilate on the
athletic game as it is played in California - played with the charm and
spirit and humor with which Californians play every game. Would that I
had space to narrate, as Maud Younger tells it - the moving story of how
the women won the vote in California. Would that I had space to describe
the whirlwind political campaigns when there are at least four
candidates in the field for every office, and when you are besought by
postal, by letter, by dodgers, by advertisements in the papers and on
the billboards to vote for all of them. Would that I had space - but
here I must take the space -to tell how the Californian plays.

Remember always that California has virtually no weather to contend
with. For three months of the year rain appears; for the remaining nine
months it is eliminated entirely. And so, with a country of rare
picture-esqueness for a background, a people of rare beauty for actors,
everybody more or less permeated with the artistic instinct and
everybody more or less writing poetry - California has a pageant for
breakfast, a fiesta for luncheon and a carnival for dinner. They are
always electing queens. In fact any girl in California, who hasn't been