An explosion shook the town, then came the fire engines. Everybody ran and of course we ran too. We saw a big, Colonial house in a blaze, then a second explosion! And a thick black mass of smoke blew off the roof. People ran hither and thither in wild excitement; a fireman dashed into the flames and carried out a dying girl; her face was bleeding and her clothes were in burnt shreds. More dying people were miraculously saved, then suddenly like a huge screen the whole house fell flat. It had no behind and no inside and the whole scene was only the “movies.” The injured face of the heroine was only red paint and the house a property one built for the purpose.

“This is nothing,” said a member of the company to me, “if you want to see something exciting, go to the chalk cliffs just on the road to Santa Maria tomorrow morning. We’re going to work on the ‘Diamond From the Sky.’ That’s our star over there! You don’t want to miss any pictures when he is in it.”

I saw a young man leaning against a telegraph pole chewing a straw. He looked almost too lazy to be alive.

“He’s always like that!” said the member of the company. “You wouldn’t think there was an ounce of go in him! He’s always whittling a stick, or chewing a straw, and if he was to be killed, he’d never move a muscle!”

“He looks kind of comatose, doesn’t he?” said the manager, who overheard. “Well, you go out to the chalk cliffs at about eleven tomorrow if you think he’s comatose, and see him come to.”

Naturally we went. We found the place easily by the number of people gathered at the spot. A shelf road was cut on the face of the high chalk cliffs, above a seventy-foot sheer drop into the water. We saw the comatose one, looking just as indifferent as ever, get into a car and start for the narrow road up on the edge of the cliff. Then another followed him. At a word from the director, they raced across the high narrow shelf, the comatose one swerved to the very edge, toppled and plunged over the abyss! No stopping the picture at the brink and putting a dummy in his place. A feeling of such nausea caught me I could not look to see him land. How he escaped with his life he alone knew. The car struck the rocks and smashed to pieces, but they say he threw himself like an eel clear of the wheel and safely into the water. They then fished him out, he got into another car just as he was, and started home as though nothing had happened. When we reached a railroad track where they were going to take another picture, the same actor was this time to drive so near the track that the locomotive might in the picture seem to hit the car. The camera man was ready to turn the crank of his camera, the locomotive was almost at the crossing, when dash! went the devil-driver toward the track. Stop? Nothing of the sort! He met it as a ram meets an enemy, head on. The locomotive carried his mangled self and wrecked machine up the track. The engineer, shaking as with the palsy, almost fell out of his cab. The company and we, too, rushed up to where the wrecked machine and injured man lay. Blood was streaming from his head, his arm distortedly twisted under him, and he was writhing in pain, but when the camera man reached him all he said was:

“This’ll be great stuff! Make a close-up quick!” They made the pictures and then he lost consciousness.

Although decorated with many bandages, he is up and about, looking as comatose as ever.

We went to a film rehearsal at the Flying A. In front of us sat the heroine, the hero, the villain, and all members of the company. The director read the words that would be printed between sections of the finished reel and the pictures were shown in negative only. Every now and then the actors made a few remarks such as, “That’s a fine action, Steve”; “Gee, Steve, that’s great!” “I like Flora down by the brook”; “Nice scene, Flora!” Finally the heroine died.

“Nobody can die with so much sob stuff as Flora,” said our friend in a whisper.

Flora heard and answered: “Some time I’d like a part that I don’t have to die in. That’s the seventeenth time I’ve died this season.”

Of the many moving picture plants we saw, the Flying A was the smallest but most interesting. The difference between the Universal City and Flying A studio is that between Barnum’s Circus at the Madison Square Garden and the Little Theater—or better, the Grand Guignol in Paris. The Universal City is a gigantic organization that can produce anything from tiger-hunting in the jungle, to plays like “Quo Vadis.”

But why—Oh, why don’t the moving picture people have someone show them how the houses of the socially prominent really look? Where do they devise the manners, customs, and nightmare interiors that could not be found outside of the society atmosphere of Dingy Dunk or Splashville except in the “movies”?

Leaving Santa Barbara about two o’clock we arrived at Paso Robles long before dark. The next morning, however, we left early in order to spend part of the day with some friends who have a cattle and alfalfa ranch about midway to Monterey. I should think the cattle would all topple over dead and the alfalfa shrivel to cinders. Cool California? The thermometer was easily 120, and that cloudless sky a blinding blaze of torture. Our friends were quite tranquil about it. “It is pretty hot here just now. You see we are pocketed in between the hill ranges, but it is beautifully mild all winter.”

To us the mild winter did not seem to compensate, since we could not understand anyone’s surviving so long as until then.

That afternoon’s drive was the hottest I hope ever to have to live through. To put your hand on unshaded metal was to burn it, as though on a hot flat-iron. The main road, El Camino Real, was good all the way to Salinas, but the branch road from there to Monterey was bumpy and bad until within a mile or so of our destination.

Of Monterey and its peerlessly beautiful seventeen-mile ocean and cedar drive, there is no need to write. Like Niagara and the Grand Canyon, it has been written about and photographed in every newspaper and periodical in the world. Also, as was the case further south, hot as it might be inland, the coast was deliciously cool. The weather changed fortunately by the time we again drove inland and up the perfect boulevard to San Francisco. They tell me, however, that so far as the neighborhood of San Francisco is concerned no one need ever dread heat, a scorching temperature being unknown. Wind you may have, and sometimes fog, but extremes of either heat or cold, never! Besides other blessings in this particular spot of this wonderful land you can also choose your own temperature. If you like warm weather, walk in the sun. If you like cold weather, walk in the shade. On the former side of the street, you will find a muslin dress just right; on the latter you will be comfortable in a sealskin coat. This is not a joke, as I had always thought it to be, but quite true.