Page:The Tourist's California by Wood, Ruth Kedzie.djvu/139

 SAN FRANCISCO 111 less tea-drinking, bell-ringing, candle-lighting and jangling of devil-chasers, and sundry terrific sounds from yun, diaJc and gnoo. The precarious balconies of Jackson Street are only memories ; the theatre is gone moving pic- tures substitute the long-drawn drama. One says there are not so many dens where lean devotees toast their opium and pack it in brown pipes ; the abascus computes less often the sum of one's purchase than the business-like pencil of a gram- mar school youth. But the highbinders and the restaurants abide. A highbinder is a highwayman who steals life in- stead of dollars, a hireling paid to avenge wrong, a Chinaman's short cut to justice, as he interprets wrong and justice. The Red and Green Band of the Thirty-six and the Tsing Pong of Pekin and Canton still have their counterparts in San Fran- cisco. As before, there are restaurant windows which overlook Portsmouth Square, where one is served with hot yellow tea and candied cocoanut, and per- haps a cake made of pork and almonds and melon seed meats baked in balls of spiced flour. The tea and the sweets are but excuses of course. Really the eyes and thoughts of the patron are not upon dainties to please the taste, but upon pictures that satisfy other senses. At a near-by table a portly merchant is ordering sharks' fins for his