Chinatown by a thousand eccentricities drew and
held me; I could never have enough of its ambiguous,
inter-racial atmosphere, as of a vitalised museum;
never wonder enough at its outlandish, necromantic-
looking vegetables set forth to sell in commonplace
American shop-windows, its temple-doors open and the
scent of the joss-stick streaming forth on the American
air, its kites of Oriental fashion hanging fouled in
Western telegraph-wires, its flights of paper prayers
which the trade-wind hunts and dissipates along Western
gutters. I was a frequent wanderer on North Beach,
gazing at the straits, and the huge Cape Horners
creeping out to sea, and imminent Tamalpais. Thence,
on my homeward way, I might visit that strange and
filthy shed, earth-paved and walled with the cages of
wild animals and birds, where at a ramshackle counter,
amid the yells of monkeys and a poignant atmosphere of
menagerie, forty-rod whisky was administered by a
proprietor as dirty as his beasts. Nor did I even
neglect Nob Hill, which is itself a kind of slum, being
the habitat of the mere millionaire.
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