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Show "In the Footprints of the Padres." Charles Warren Stoddard, professor of English En-glish literature in the Catholic University of America, Amer-ica, has put into book form his California life, and to those who love the present California, and particularly par-ticularly San Francisco.the book is full of rare interest. Robertson, San Francisco, is the publisher. pub-lisher. Following are a few extracts: j Speaking of his initiation into the mysteries of the "wide-open" town he says: ! "No one tried to prevent our entering. We merely followed the others; and, indeed, it was all j a mystery to us. Cards were being dealt at the f faro tables, and dealt by beautiful women in be- j wildering attire. They alsp turned the wheels of fortune or misfortune, and threw dice, and were i skilled in all the arts that beguile and betray the innocent. There was no limit to the gambling in those days. There was no question of age or color or sex; opportunity lay in wait for inclination at ; the street corners and in the highways and by- ways. The wonder is that there were not more ! victims driven to madness or suicide." j Later the actor-journalist lived in a crumbling castle on old Rincon Hill. One day a "lean, lithe stranger came to see him, and Stoddard says: "He liked the crumbling estate, and even as much of it as had gone into the depths forever. He liked the sagging and sighing cypresses with their roots in. the air, that hung upon and clung upon the nigged edge of the remainder. Ho liked the shaky stairway that led to it (when it was not out of gear), and all that was irrelative and irrel-eva irrel-eva nt, and what might have been irritating to another an-other was to him singularly appealing and engaging, engag-ing, for he was a poet and a romancer, and his name was Robert Louis Stevenson. "He used to come to that eyrie on Rincon Hill to chat and dream; he called it 'the most San Francsicoey part of San Francisco,' and so it was. It was the beginning and the end of the first period of social development on the Pacific coast. There is a picture of it, or of the south part of it in Gertrude Atherton's story, 'The Californians. The little glimpse that Louis Stevenson had of it in its decay gave him a few realistic pages for 'The Wrecker.' " |