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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



runs in "prospects," and calls up, as he 

 runs along, vivid pictures of sun-struck 

 canyons and sudden odors of sage and 

 chaparral. 



AH SING AND HIS DAUGHTER 



He still looks with huge disfavor upon 

 Ah Sing, flapping in loose cloth shoes 

 along Chinatown's narrow alleys. In his 

 time he gave poor Ah the devil's own 

 time of it, hunting him with the same 

 venom his grandson displays to the Jap. 



Time, however, brings its surceases. 

 The best of servants, most faithful of 

 friends, a true gentleman in his quiet 

 reservations, the Chinaman has won a 

 permanent place in California's life. 

 Forty thousand of him — save for the 

 "tong wars," during which he practices 

 race suicide with a hatchet — live at peace 

 in San Francisco ; also he has lived down 

 the reputation for "tricks that are vain" 

 foisted upon him by Bret Harte. His 

 word passes everywhere for his bond. 



His daughter, little Miss Ah, is a living 

 proof of his complete patriation. That 

 which it has done for little Miss San 

 Francisco, developing her into the love- 

 liest creature in all the world, the climate 

 has also done for little Miss Ah. She is 

 twice as tall and ten times as pretty as 

 her sallow, short- footed slave mother. 

 Slim and delicately colored by nature — 

 helped out a bit, perhaps, by a rabbit's 

 foot — she is to be seen any day in bevies 

 of three or more, happy and free, full of 

 giggles and chatter, lending the color of 

 her blue, cerise, or mauve pantaloons to 

 the duller costumes on Market Street. 

 Yet so much has she become a part of 

 San Francisco's life that none but a ten- 

 derfoot stares at her. 



And that which climate has done for 

 Miss Ah it is also doing for higher 

 things, promoting greater loveliness in 

 music, painting, sculpture, letters, all the 

 arts. It is trite, now, to draw the parallel 

 between California and ancient Greece, 

 yet the causes which made the latter are 

 already at work to develop in the former 

 a like sensitiveness to the beautiful. The 

 cold northlands were always the mother 

 of great deeds. First in conquest, later 

 in the inventions that make for material 

 well-being, they led the world. But while 



their children were still chanting their 

 boisterous sagas to the clashing of shields, 

 the cadences of real song, rhythms of 

 true poetry, were rising and falling in 

 the southlands in harmony with the surge 

 and recession of Mediterranean waves. 



That climate is the mother of art, then, 

 there can be no doubt. In a pleasant land, 

 where neither tweaking cold nor ener- 

 vating heat chill or enervate the mind, it 

 will inevitably make its highest flights, 

 and those ideal conditions which made 

 the Mediterranean the cradle of the arts 

 are duplicated in California. From the 

 virile sowing of pioneer seed which, as 

 under the breath of a mighty wind, was 

 brought in from the four quarters of the 

 world by the "gold rush" of '49, has al- 

 ready issued a crop of great writers and 

 poets. 



A LONG LIST OF AUTHORS 



First, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, 

 Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, 

 Edwin Markham, each celebrating in his 

 or her own inimitable way the spread of 

 desert or mountain, misty canyons, ca- 

 thedral redwoods, oak-studded meads and 

 riven valleys, bound in between the snow- 

 capped Sierras and vast blue spread of 

 the sea. 



After them came a second crop — 

 Frank Norris and Jack London, Mary 

 Austin, George Sterling, John Fleming 

 Wilson, James Hopper, Gertrude Ather- 

 ton — and upon their heels now comes 

 treading a greater host — poets, painters, 

 writers, actors, playwrights, good crafts- 

 men — all who would have stood out as 

 notable figures in the less crowded fields 

 of 20 years ago. And with such a be- 

 ginning, what can be the end — but the 

 creation of a second Greece? 



The Exposition, with its warm color, 

 great spaces, and huge masses rising from 

 the ruins of a burned city, is at once a 

 product and manifestation of this later 

 Grecian spirit. Where else could its 

 colorful beauty have been so perfectly at 

 home, after granting the spirit to pro- 

 duce it ? It is true that it has been called 

 into existence only to serve the need of 

 an hour; but that merely increases the 

 wonder of it ! 



