Many a time I have seen him walk into a restaurant with measured tread—he never hurried. The head waiter would rush up to greet him respectfully. The Emperor would ask:
He would be seated at the best table and given the best the house afforded. Having finished, he would walk out majestically without paying, of course. The Emperor Norton _never_ got out of his part.
This could never have happened in the East. In Concord, Massachusetts, people would have lifted their eyebrows and given him food and raiment as if he were a tramp, but indulged him in his whimsies—never! In New York, those smart society women who send their daughters out upon Fifth Avenue to beg money for various charities would most certainly have had the Emperor Norton put in an institution for the insane.
Chapter IV: On Being a Tenderfoot _North of California_
Twenty miles from Water, Thirty miles from Mail, Forty miles from Hell, Girl Wanted—Inquire within.
Rudely printed and stuck at a rakish angle upon a tree, hundreds of miles from civilization, or indeed from any visible touch of human habitation, this sign greeted the astonished eyes of the passengers who traveled on the stage line from Redding to Shasta in the north of California in ’75. Leading from it, off into the woods, was a tiny newly trodden path—an invitation that any adventurous young woman could hardly fail to take—had any come that way. But there was the joke—few did.
These Westerners made jests of everything, their loneliness and misery in particular, and the characteristic is not dead yet. For just thirty years later, in the city of San Francisco, people forced to rush from their homes by a great conflagration, leaving all their worldly possessions behind them, put up outside their improvised tents and shacks such ridiculous signs as these:
Old clothes for sale. Beer, five cents. Fortunes told. Dew Drop Inn. Rooms To Let.
And while the fire still raged within the walls of that hostelry of which they were all so proud, there appeared over the poorest and most tumble-down shelter of all the words:
California still may be young, but, better yet, California is still brave and unspoiled.
The distance to Redding by railway seemed to take hours and hours. There were no fences, no divisions of property, no irregular stone-wall separations, as in the East, and no parti-colored plaids of green and brown denoting “this is mine and that is yours,” that I was to see in Europe later on. It was my first view of large acreage—miles and miles of it—and in the distance (real distance in California, which you soon find out if you start to walk it) great hills of red and purple, while right beside the tracks, unprotected from the weather, were endless stretches of sacks rammed full of wheat.