Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/136

 108 THE TOURIST'S CALIFORNIA glow and flutter against a softer mat than safe and cleanly vitrified brick. The time-consuming trades of tinker and letter- writer seem illy placed on cemented door-steps. One misses the panels of mystery that once rolled darkly down from worm-eaten lintels panels of gloom which one pushed through to reach the hollowed treads of stairs that dropped sidewise from the wall, that creaked up to pungent rooms of jade-setter and embroiderer. The markets are less changed. Stalls are fringed by the same garlands of dried livers and gel- atinous mosses ; tall baskets hold the same tender roots and secretive bulbs ; the same supple saf- fron fingers sort lily-pots and lettuce. And the faces are the same, though shorn of their queues. The fire blotted out customs even as it burned away cellars that dripped with crime, that were, according to the guides, evil as they were enthralling. But the faces do not change. . . thin lips, wise and contemptuous ; inscrutable, up- sloping eye-lashes; bony jaws and foreheads that show high lights like white glints on porcelain, one sees them still before the ideographs of the street bulletins, or grouped in sly doorways, or glancing down the new-paved streets. Merchants who used to wear stiff skull-caps with a button in the middle like the knob of a stew-pan lid, and silken jackets over trousers which tapered