This Restaurant Life, However Does Not Express Exactly The Careless,
Pleasure-Loving Character Of The People.
In great part their pleasures
were simple, inexpensive and out of doors.
No people were fonder of
expeditions into the country, of picnics - which might be brought off at
almost any season of the year - and of long tours in the great mountains
and forests.
Hospitality was nearly a vice. As in the early mining days, if they
liked the stranger the people took him in. At the first meeting the San
Francisco man had him put up at the club; at the second, he invited him
home to dinner. As long as the stranger stayed he was being invited to
week end parties at ranches, to little dinners in this or that
restaurant and to the houses of his new acquaintances, until his
engagements grew beyond hope of fulfilment. Perhaps there was rather too
much of this kind of thing. At the end of a fortnight a visitor with a
pleasant smile and a good story left the place a wreck. This tendency
ran through all grades of society - except, perhaps, the sporting people
who kept the tracks and the fighting game alive. These also met the
stranger - and also took him in.
Centres of man hospitality were the clubs, especially the famous
Bohemian and the Family. The latter was an offshot of the Bohemian; and
it had been growing fast and vieing with the older organization for the
honor of entertaining pleasing and distinguished visitors.
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