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Updated: September 29, 2025
He wanted to sing, he wanted to dance; he could not believe it was he, as he rode up the lonely length of Broadway in the cable-car, between the wild, irregular walls of the canyon which the cable-cars have all to themselves at the end of a summer afternoon.
"Well," said Truesdale, quietly, "I should think you would do very well at home much better than here." "But where am I to see you before I go? Where are we to say good-bye?" A cable-car clanged along the cross-street immediately ahead of them, and the ten yellow stories of a vast hotel loomed up just beyond. "Right on this corner," replied Truesdale, as the carriage bumped across the tracks.
Sometimes she could walk home, but not to-night, in the teeth of this wind. She got a seat on the "dummy" of a cable-car.
So on a hazy, soft November morning they found themselves on the cable-car that in those days slipped down the steep streets of Nob Hill, through the odorous, filthy gaiety of the Chinese quarter, through the warehouse district, and out across the great crescent of the water-front.
Tell me, you who love Shelley the "pardlike spirit, beautiful and swift" "thyself the wild west wind, oh boy divine!" tell me how much you think you'd have had of that glorious burst of music that golden rain of melody, of heavenly ecstasy if the man who wrote had been a wholesale-paper clerk or a cable-car conductor!
The cable-car has taken the men down town to business, the children are at school, and the big dogs, three and a third to each absent child, lie nosing the winter-killed grass and wondering when the shoots will make it possible for a gentleman to take his spring medicine.
Men who have wrestled with the demons of hell do not tumble around like elephants, no matter how happy they are. I wish I could take out Beethoven's scherzos! My heart leaps when I think of my one big step. I have put those pages away I shall not look at them again for a month. Then I can judge them. April 13th. A cable-car conductor and a poet! I think that will be a story worth telling.
Therefore it occurred to me that in the hours of weariness I would write about it what was in my mind what fears and what hopes; why and how I write it will be a story in itself, and some day I think it will be read. I have come to the last stage of the fight, and I see the goal. Yesterday I was a cable-car conductor, and to-day I am a poet!
If the day were fine, perhaps everybody save mother took a cable-car ride, or a walk, or something equally exciting. The sparkle of environment had won these people away from tombstone reading and family prayers as a Sabbath diversion, but even California could not be expected to make over a bluestocking in an eye's twinkling.
A cable-car might have been a comet flashing along the edge of a void. "I wonder," he said, "I wonder should San Francisco disappear be burned by that fire you are always expecting or if the bay should shoal, or the Golden Gate rush together, so that she would have no reason for existence, and gradually be devoured by time I suppose the fog and the winds would still be faithful.
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