Star-dust in Hollywood (1930)

Los *A7tge/es — -from an Empty House I suppose we should explain the circumstances that had brought me to bed in an empty house in Los Angeles, Cal., U.S.A. Since the time when we had decently interred the remains of the Happy Hearse x in the car cemetery at Easyport we had been moving across the country, making our living and railway fares by casual lecturing. We had lodged for a month in a Swedish rooming-house in Chicago, but had seen no blink of hold-up men nor heard the sudden pistol chatter of street-duelling. We had, however, interviewed and sketched Mayor Thompson, the enemy of England, but had found no more than a dull, fat man with nectarine-coloured braces. We had sailed a part of the Mississippi in one of the last of the old stern-wheeled passenger-boats, had noted the devastations of the great floods, and had heard an old hobo on the levee at Greenfields declare : "When the waters cleared away, I tell you, sir, the crawfish were that big and bold they'd stand right up in the gutters of this town and fight you back." We had spent much time in the night-courts of New Orleans, and had visited a strange, lost village of the Mississippi delta, inhabited by a Spanish colony, still speaking the Spanish of Don Quixote, muskrat hunters who had in recent years declared war against the United States and had won the only battle in the campaign. We had crossed the southern stretch of the continent in the " Sunset Limited," accompanied by a mortician and embalmer who enlivened the route with memories of his customers and stories of his art. We had lectured in Los Angeles, had passed on to San Francisco, had bought an old air-cooled car there, and in it had returned to Los Angeles. We had left New York in November; it was now March. 1 See On Wandering Wheels (John Lane). [13]