And out of the sidewalk grew all the different types of kiddie kars and coasters that are so prevalent.  I saw a whole load of children zipping down a steep San Francisco hill the other day much as we children coasted down winter hills on wicked “double rippers.”  A hill and gravity and a lot of kids, what possibilities.  And out of the sidewalk have evolved those nameless explosives that have been so popular over the recent Fourth.  A row of kids sitting on a curb, one of them darts out to the car track, a car comes, great expectancy from the kids, terrific noise, annoyed looks on the faces of sour adults, unbounded joy from a row of kids sitting on the curb.

Recently I saw a tomboy who had organized the children in her block, and had confiscated an alley between two straight gray houses, and I don’t know what the game was but it entailed trips on a car down the alley and a very bossy motorman, and “turns,” over which everyone quarreled.

Some dainty little Chinese girls were playing a sidewalk game with a white stone which was a version of an old, old child game.  The child would hop to the stone and kick it away and hop to it again until she missed, the object being to beat her opponent in the distance traveled.  And I saw some exquisite little Japanese girls playing jump rope and chanting one of the numerous litanies that go with that beautiful game.

The sidewalks of San Francisco.  They are full of adventure.  Robert Louis Stevenson would have seen it all.  But to our dull eyes are only gray cement block.  Just a sidewalk to us and to kiddies there are mountains in which Roy Gardner hides, and woods, and Tom Mix on a horse dashes right past us and we never see him at all.

Feet That Pass on Market St.

There is something about walking along Market street with the procession of people that passes all day, ah, how shall I express it?  It is thrilling and it is amusing; it is cosmic and it is puny.  It is often ridiculous and always sublime.  Sometimes when we are in most of a hurry the consciousness of the procession will come to us.  It is as though we were one of a moving crowd that never began and will never end.  At such times we listen to the sound of their feet, the steady, unceasing step by step, an endless tramp as though it were beating out the rhythm — “Eternity, eternity, eternity.”

As we pass voices call to us from the wayside, a cripple so far down below us on the very ground offering his silent pencils; the allurement of flowers; a hoarse newsboy with his old, old face screwed into a thousand anxious wrinkles; a blind man, silent supplicant, twirling his thumbs; and from the windows the call of strawberries at 15 cents a basket.  Overhead an aeroplane hums its way and receives from us the tribute of an upward glance.  We gaze upward and think how many years before our day aeroplanes were flying overhead in the dreams of men who passed and passed in the long procession.