American Notes | Page 6

was enough that the pavements were full of white men
and women, the streets clanging with traffic, and that the restful roar of
a great city rang in my ears. The cable cars glided to all points of the
compass at once. I took them one by one till I could go no further. San
Francisco has been pitched down on the sand bunkers of the Bikaneer
desert. About one fourth of it is ground reclaimed from the sea--any
old-timers will tell you all about that. The remainder is just ragged,
unthrifty sand hills, to-day pegged down by houses.
From an English point of view there has not been the least attempt at
grading those hills, and indeed you might as well try to grade the
hillocks of Sind. The cable cars have for all practical purposes made
San Francisco a dead level. They take no count of rise or fall, but slide
equably on their appointed courses from one end to the other of a
six-mile street. They turn corners almost at right angles, cross other
lines, and for aught I know may run up the sides of houses. There is no
visible agency of their flight, but once in awhile you shall pass a
five-storied building humming with machinery that winds up an
everlasting wire cable, and the initiated will tell you that here is the
mechanism. I gave up asking questions. If it pleases Providence to
make a car run up and down a slit in the ground for many miles, and if

for twopence halfpenny I can ride in that car, why shall I seek the
reasons of the miracle? Rather let me look out of the windows till the
shops give place to thousands and thousands of little houses made of
wood (to imitate stone), each house just big enough for a man and his
family. Let me watch the people in the cars and try to find out in what
manner they differ from us, their ancestors.
It grieves me now that I cursed them (in the matter of book piracy),
because I perceived that my curse is working and that their speech is
be-coming a horror already. They delude them-selves into the belief
that they talk English--the English--and I have already been pitied for
speaking with "an English accent." The man who pitied me spoke, so
far as I was concerned, the language of thieves. And they all do. Where
we put the accent forward they throw it back, and vice versa where we
give the long "a" they use the short, and words so simple as to be past
mistaking they pronounce somewhere up in the dome of their heads.
How do these things happen?
Oliver Wendell Holmes says that the Yankee school-marm, the cider
and the salt codfish of the Eastern States, are responsible for what he
calls a nasal accent. I know better. They stole books from across the
water without paying for 'em, and the snort of delight was fixed in their
nostrils forever by a just Providence. That is why they talk a foreign
tongue to-day.
"Cats is dogs, and rabbits is dogs, and so's parrots. But this 'ere tortoise
is an insect, so there ain't no charge," as the old porter said.
A Hindoo is a Hindoo and a brother to the man who knows his
vernacular. And a French-man is French because he speaks his own
language. But the American has no language. He is dialect, slang,
provincialism, accent, and so forth. Now that I have heard their voices,
all the beauty of Bret Harte is being ruined for me, because I find
myself catching through the roll of his rhythmical prose the cadence of
his peculiar fatherland. Get an American lady to read to you "How
Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar," and see how much is, under her
tongue, left of the beauty of the original.
But I am sorry for Bret Harte. It happened this way. A reporter asked
me what I thought of the city, and I made answer suavely that it was
hallowed ground to me, because of Bret Harte. That was true.
"Well," said the reporter, "Bret Harte claims California, but California

don't claim Bret Harte. He's been so long in England that he's quite
English. Have you seen our cracker factories or the new offices of the
'Examiner'?"
He could not understand that to the outside world the city was worth a
great deal less than the man. I never intended to curse the people with a
provincialism so vast as this.
But let us return to our sheep--which means the sea-lions of the Cliff
House. They are the great show of San Francisco. You take a train
which pulls up the middle of the street (it killed two people the