Cayley swept on with his anecdotes. "Who would believe the story of 'Big Bertha,' who buncoed all the swellest Hebrews in town, and ended by playing Mazeppa in tights at the Bella Union Theater? Who has written the true story of Dennis Kearney, the hack-driver, who had his speeches written for him by reporters, and went East with a big head, unconsciously to plagiarize Wendell Phillips in Fanueil Hall? Or of 'Mammy' Pleasant, the old negress who had such mysterious influence over so many millionaires--who couldn't be bribed--who died at last, with all her secrets untold? There's Romance in purple letters!
"What do you think of a first folio Shakespeare, the rent-roll of Stratford parish, and a collection of Incunabula worth thirty thousand dollars, kept in the deserted library on Montgomery Street in a case, by Jove, without a lock! What's the matter with Little Pete, the Chinaman, jobbing all the race-tracks in California? Who'd believe that there are streets here, within a mile of Lotta's fountain, so steep that they pasture cows on the grass?"
"Then there's Emperor Norton, and the Vigilance Committee, and all the secrets of the Chinatown slave trade," Clytie contributed, with aroused interest.
"Oh, I'm not speaking of that sort of thing. That's been done, and the East and England think that Romance departed from here with the red-shirted miner. Everybody knows about the Bret Harte type of adventure. It's the things that are going on now or have happened within a few years--like finding that Chinese woman's skeleton upside down, built into the wall of the house on the corner of Powell and Sutter; like Bill Dockery, the food inspector, who terrorized the San Bruno road, like a new Claude Duval, holding up the milkmen with a revolver and a lactometer, and went here, there and everywhere, into restaurants and hotels all over the peninsula, dumping watered milk into the streets till San Francisco ran white with it."
"Then there's Carminetti's," Clytie recalled, now. "That's modern enough, and typical of San Francisco, isn't it? I mean not so much what's done there, as the way they do it. I've always wanted to go down there some Saturday night and see just what it's like."