In the Footprints of the Padres

ALONG THE PACIFIC SHORE

LL night we tossed on the bosom of the lake between San Carlos, at the source of the San Juan river, and Virgin Bay, on the opposite shore. The lake is on a table-land a hundred feet or more above the sea; it is a hundred miles in length and forty-five in width. Our track lay diagonally across it, a stretch of eighty miles; and when the morning broke upon us we were upon the point of dropping anchor under the cool shadow of cloud-capped mountains and in a most refreshing temperature.

Oh, the purple light of dawn that flooded the Bay of the Blessed Virgin! Of course the night was a horror, and it was our second in transit; but we were nearing the end of the journey across the Isthmus and were shortly to embark for San Francisco. I fear we children regretted the fact. Our life for three days had been like a veritable "Jungle Book." It almost out-Kiplinged Kipling. We might never again float through Monkey Land, with clouds of parrots hovering over us and a whole menagerie of extraordinary creatures making side-shows of themselves on every hand.

At Virgin Bay we were crowded like sheep into lighters, that were speedily overladen. Very serious accidents have happened in consequence. A year before our journey an overcrowded barge was swamped at Virgin Bay and four and twenty passengers were drowned. The "Transit Company," supposed to be responsible for the life and safety of each one of us, seemed to trouble itself very little concerning our fate. The truth was they had been paid in full before we boarded the Star of the West at Pier No. 2, North River.

Having landed in safety, in spite of the negligence of the "Transit Company," our next move was to secure some means of transportation over the mountain and down to San Juan del Sur. We were each provided with a ticket calling for a seat in the saddle or on a bench in a springless wagon. Naturally, the women and children were relegated to the wagons, and were there huddled together like so much live stock destined for the market. The men scrambled and even fought for the diminutive donkeys that were to bear them over the mountain pass. A circus knows no comedy like ours on that occasion. It is true we had but twelve miles to traverse, and some of these were level; but by and by the road dipped and climbed and swerved and plunged into the depths, only to soar again along the giddy verge of some precipice that overhung a fathomless abyss. That is how it seemed to us as we clung to the hard benches of our wagon with its four-mule attachment.

Once a wagon just ahead of us, having refused to answer to its brakes, went rushing down a fearful grade and was hurled into a tangle of underbrush,—which is doubtless what saved the lives of its occupants, for they landed as lightly as if on feather-beds. From that hour our hearts were in our throats. Even the thatched lodges of the natives, swarming with bare brown babies, and often having tame monkeys and parrots in the doorways, could not beguile us; nor all the fruits, were they never so tempting; nor the flowers, though they were past belief for size and shape and color and perfume.

Over the shining heights the wind scudded, behatting many a head that went bare thereafter. Out of the gorges ascended the voice of the waters, dashing noisily but invisibly on their joyous way to the sea. From one of those heights, looking westward over groves of bread-fruit trees and fixed fountains of feathery bamboo, over palms that towered like plumes in space and made silhouettes against the sky, we saw a long, level line of blue—as blue and bluer than the sky itself,—and we knew it was the Pacific! We were little fellows in those days, we children; yet I fancy that we felt not unlike Balboa when we knelt upon that peak in Darien and thanked God that he had the glory of discovering a new and unnamed ocean.

Why, I wonder, did Keats, in his famous sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," make his historical mistake when he sang—

It mattered not to us whether our name was Cortez or Balboa. With any other name we would have been just as jolly; for we were looking for the first time upon a sea that was to us as good as undiscovered, and we were shortly to brave it in a vessel bound for the Golden Gate. At our time of life that smacked a little of circumnavigation.

San Juan del Sur! It was scarcely to be called a village,—a mere handful of huts scattered upon the shore of a small bay and almost surrounded by mountains. It had no street, unless the sea sands it fronted upon could be called such. It had no church, no school, no public buildings. Its hotels were barns where the gold-seekers were fed without ceremony on beans and hardtack. Fruits were plentiful, and that was fortunate.

There, as in every settlement in Central America, the eaves of the dwellings were lined with Turkey buzzards. These huge birds are regarded with something akin to veneration. They are never molested; indeed, like the pariah dogs of the Orient, they have the right of way; and they are evidently conscious of the fact, for they are tamer than barnyard fowls. They are the scavengers of the tropics. They sit upon the housetop and among the branches of the trees, awaiting the hour when the refuse of the domestic meal is thrown into the street. There is no drainage in those villages; strange to say, even in the larger cities there is none. Offal of every description is cast forth into the highways and byways; and at that moment, with one accord, down sweep the grim sentinels to devour it. They feast upon carrion and every form of filth. They are polution personified, and yet they are the salvation of the indolent people, who would, but for the timely service of these ravenous birds, soon be wallowing in fetid refuse and putrefaction under the fierce rays of their merciless sun.

In the twilight we wandered by a crescent shore that was thickly strewn with shells. They were not the tribute of northern waters: they were as delicately fashioned and as variously tinted as flowers. All that they lacked was fragrance; and this we realized as we stored them carefully away, resolving that they should become the nucleus of a museum of natural history as soon as we got settled in our California home.

We had crossed the Isthmus in safety. Yonder, in the offing, the ship that was to carry us northward to San Francisco lay at anchor. For three days we had suffered the joys of travel and adventure. On the San Juan river we had again and again touched points along the varying routes proposed, by the Maritime Canal Company of Nicaragua and the Walker Commission, as being practical for the construction of a great ship canal that shall join the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. We had passed from sea to sea, a distance of about two hundred miles.

The San Juan river, one hundred and twenty miles in length, has a fall of one foot to the mile. This will necessitate the introduction of at least six massive locks between the Atlantic and the lake. Sometimes the river can be utilized, but not without dredging; for it is shallow from beginning to end, and near its mouth is ribbed with sand-bars. For seventy miles the lake is navigable for vessels of the heaviest draught. Beyond the lake there must be a clean-cut over or through the mountains to the Pacific, and here six locks are reckoned sufficient. Cross-cuts from one bend in the river to another can be constructed at the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or less, per mile. The canal must be sunk or raised at intervals; there will, therefore, at various points be the need of a wall of great strength and durability, from one hundred and thirty to three hundred feet in height or depth.

The annual rain-fall in the river region between Lake Nicaragua and the Caribbean Sea is twenty feet; annual evaporation, three feet. These points must be considered in the construction and feeding of the canal, even though it is to vary in width. The dimensions of the proposed canal, as recommended by the Walker Government Commission, are as follows: total length, one hundred and eighty-nine miles; minimum depth of water at all stages, thirty feet; width, one hundred feet in rock-cuts, elsewhere varying from one hundred and fifty to three hundred feet—except in Lake Nicaragua, where one end of the channel will be made six hundred feet wide.

Nearly fifty years ago, when a canal was projected, the Childs survey set the cost at thirty-seven million dollars. Now the commissioners differ on the question of total cost, the several estimates ranging from one hundred and eighteen million to one hundred and thirty-five million dollars. The United States Congress at its last session authorized the expenditure of one million by a new commission "to investigate the merits of all suggested locations and develop a project for an Isthmus Canal."

And so we left the land of the lizard. What wonders they are! From an inch to two feet in length, slim, slippery, and of many and changeful colors, they literally inhabit the land, and are as much at home in a house as out of it; indeed, the houses are never free of them. They sailed up the river with us, and crossed the lake in our company, and sat by the mountain wayside awaiting our arrival; for they are curious and sociable little beasts. As for the San Juan river, 'tis like the Ocklawaha of Florida many times multiplied, and with all its original attractions in a state of perfect preservation.

All the way up the coast we literally hugged the shore; only during the hours when we were crossing the yawning mouth of the Gulf of California were we for a single moment out of sight of land. I know not if this was a saving in time and distance, and therefore a saving in fuel and provender; or if our ship, the John L. Stevens, was thought to be overloaded and unsafe, and was kept within easy reach of shore for fear of accident. We steamed for two weeks between a landscape and a seascape that afforded constant diversion. At night we sometimes saw flame-tipped volcanoes; there was ever the undulating outline of the Sierra Nevada Mountains through Central America, Mexico, and California.

Just once did we pause on the way. One evening our ship turned in its course and made directly for the land. It seemed that we must be dashed upon the headlands we were approaching, but as we drew nearer they parted, and we entered the land-locked harbor of Acapulco, the chief Mexican port on the Pacific. It was an amphitheatre dotted with twinkling lights. Our ship was speedily surrounded by small boats of all descriptions, wherein sat merchants noisily calling upon us to purchase their wares. They had abundant fruits, shells, corals, curios. They flashed them in the light of their torches; they baited us to bargain with them. It was a Venetian fete with a vengeance; for the hawkers were sometimes more impertinent than polite. It was a feast of lanterns, and not without the accompaniment of guitars and castanets, and rich, soft voices.

After that we were eager for the end of it all. There was Santa Catalina, off the California coast, then an uninhabited island given over to sunshine and wild goats, now one of the most popular and populous of California summer and winter resorts—for 'tis all the same on the Pacific coast; one season is damper than the other, that is the only difference. The coast grew bare and bleak; the wind freshened and we were glad to put on our wraps. And then at last, after a journey of nearly five thousand miles, we slowed up in a fog so dense it dripped from the scuppers of the ship; we heard the boom of the surf pounding upon the invisible shore, and the hoarse bark of a chorus of sea-lions, and were told we were at the threshold of the Golden Gate, and should enter it as soon as the fog lifted and made room for us.

IN THE WAKE OF DRAKE

E were buried alive in fathomless depths of fog. We were a fixture until that fog lifted. It was an impenetrable barrier. Upon the point of entering one of the most wonderful harbors in the world, the glory of the newest of new lands, we found ourselves prisoners, and for a time at least involved in the mazes of ancient history.

In 1535 Cortez coasted both sides of the Gulf of California—first called the Sea of Cortez; or the Vermilion Sea, perhaps from its resemblance to the Red Sea between Arabia and Egypt; or possibly from the discoloration of its waters near the mouth of the Rio Colorado, or Red River.

In 1577 Captain Drake, even then distinguished as a navigator, fitted out a buccaneering expedition against the Spaniards; it was a wild-goose chase and led him round the globe. In those days the wealth of the Philippines was shipped annually in a galleon from Manila to Acapulco, Mexico, on its way to Europe. Drake hoped to intercept one of these richly laden galleons, and he therefore threaded the Straits of Magellan, and, sailing northward, found himself, in 1579, within sight of the coast of California. All along the Pacific shore from Patagonia to California he was busily occupied in capturing and plundering Spanish settlements and Spanish ships. Wishing to turn home with his treasure, and fearing he might be waylaid by his enemies if he were again to thread the Straits of Magellan, he thought to reach England by the Cape of Good Hope. This was in the autumn of 1579. To quote the language of an old chronicler of the voyage:

"He was obliged to sail toward the north; in which course having continued six hundred leagues, and being got into forty-three degrees north latitude, they found it intolerably cold; upon which they steered southward till they got into thirty-eight degrees north latitude, where they discovered a country which, from its white cliffs, they called Nova Albion, though it is now known by the name of California.

"They here discovered a bay, which entering with a favorable gale, they found several huts by the waterside, well defended from the severity of the weather. Going on shore, they found a fire in the middle of each house, and the people lying around it upon rushes. The men go quite naked, but the women have a deerskin over their shoulders, and round their waist a covering of bulrushes after the manner of hemp.

"These people bringing the Admiral [Captain Drake] a present of feathers and cauls of network, he entertained them so kindly and generously that they were extremely pleased; and afterward they sent him a present of feathers and bags of tobacco. A number of them coming to deliver it, gathered themselves together at the top of a small hill, from the highest point of which one of them harangued the Admiral, whose tent was placed at the bottom. When the speech was ended they laid down their arms and came down, offering their presents; at the same time returning what the Admiral had given them. The women remaining on the hill, tearing their hair and making dreadful howlings, the Admiral supposed they were engaged in making sacrifices, and thereupon ordered divine service to be performed at his tent, at which these people attended with astonishment.

"The arrival of the English in California being soon known through the country, two persons in the character of ambassadors came to the Admiral and informed him, in the best manner they were able, that the king would visit him, if he might be assured of coming in safety. Being satisfied on this point, a numerous company soon appeared, in front of which was a very comely person bearing a kind of sceptre, on which hung two crowns, and three chains of great length. The chains were of bones, and the crowns of network, curiously wrought with feathers of many colors.

"Next to sceptre-bearer came the king, a handsome, majestic person, surrounded by a number of tall men dressed in skins, who were followed by the common people, who, to make the grander appearance, had painted their faces of various colors; and all of them, even the children, being loaded with presents.

"The men being drawn up in line of battle, the Admiral stood ready to receive the king within the fences of his tent. The company halted at a distance, and the sceptre-bearer made a speech half an hour long; at the end of which he began singing and dancing, in which he was followed by the king and all the people; who, continuing to sing and dance, came quite up to the tent; when, sitting down, the king took off his crown of feathers, placed it on the Admiral's head, and put on him the other ensigns of royalty; and it is said he made him a solemn tender of his whole kingdom; all which the Admiral accepted in the name of the Queen his sovereign, in hope that these proceedings might, one time or other, contribute to the advantage of England.

"The people, dispersing themselves among the Admiral's tents, professed the utmost admiration and esteem for the English, whom they looked upon as more than mortal; and accordingly prepared to offer sacrifices to them, which the English rejected with abhorrence; directing them, by various signs, that their religious worship was alone due to the supreme Maker and Preserver of all things....

"The Admiral, at his departure, set up a pillar with a large plate on it, on which were engraved her Majesty's name, picture, arms, and title to the country; together with the Admiral's name and the time of his arrival there."

Pinkerton says in his description of Drake's voyage: "The land is so rich in gold and silver that upon the slightest turning it up with a spade these rich materials plainly appear mixed with the mould." It is not strange, if this were the case, that the natives—who, though apparently gentle and well disposed, were barbarians—should naturally have possessed the taste so characteristic of a barbarous people, and have loved to decorate themselves even lavishly with ornaments rudely fashioned in this rare metal. Yet they seemed to know little of its value, and to care less for it than for fuss and feathers. Either they were a singularly stupid race, simpler even than the child of ordinary intelligence, or they scorned the allurements of a metal that so few are able to resist.

Drake was not the first navigator to touch upon those shores. The explorer Juan Cabrillo, in 1542-43, visited the coast of Upper California. A number of landings were made at different points along the coast and on the islands near Santa Barbara. Cabrillo died during the expedition; but his successor, Ferralo, continued the voyage as far north as latitude 42°. Probably Drake had no knowledge of the discovery of California by the Spaniards six and thirty years before he dropped anchor in the bay that now bears his name, and for many years he was looked upon as the first discoverer of the Golden State. Even to this day there are those who give him all the credit. Queen Elizabeth knighted him for his services in this and his previous expeditions; telling him, as his chronicler records, "that his actions did him more honor than his title." Her Majesty seems not to have been much impressed by his tales of the riches of the New World—if, indeed, they ever came to the royal ear,—for she made no effort to develop the resources of her territory. No adventurous argonauts set sail for the Pacific coast in search of gold till two hundred and seventy years later.

There seems to have been a spell cast over the land and the sea. We are sure that Sir Francis Drake did not enter the Bay of San Francisco, and that he had no knowledge of its existence, though he was almost within sight of it. In one of the records of his voyage we read of the chilly air and of the dense fogs that prevailed in that region; of the "white banks and cliffs which lie toward the sea"; and of islands which are known as the Farallones, and which lie about thirty miles off the coast and opposite the Golden Gate.

In 1587 Captain Thomas Cavendish, afterward knighted by Queen Elizabeth, touched upon Cape St. Lucas, at the extremity of Lower California. He was a privateer lying in wait for the galleon laden with the wealth of the Philippines and bound for Acapulco. When she hove in sight there was a chase, a hot engagement, and a capture by the English Admiral. "This prize," says the historian of the voyage, "contained one hundred and twenty-two thousand pesos of gold, besides great quantities of rich silks, satins, damasks, and musk, with a good stock of provisions." In those romantic and adventurous days piracy was legalized by formal license; the spoils were supposed to consist of gold and silver only, or of light movable goods.

The next English filibuster to visit the California coast was Captain Woodes Rogers—arriving in November, 1709. He described the natives of the California peninsula as being "quite naked, and strangers to the European manner of trafficking. They lived in huts made of boughs and leaves, erected in the form of bowers; with a fire before the door, round which they lay and slept. Some of the women wore pearls about their necks, which they fastened with a string of silk grass, having first notched them round." Captain Rogers imagined that the wearers of the pearls did not know how to bore them, and it is more than likely that they did not. Neither did they know the value of these pearls; for "they were mixed with sticks, bits of shells, and berries, which they thought so great an ornament that they would not accept glass beads of various colors, which the English offered them."

The narrator says: "The men are straight and well built, having long black hair, and are of a dark brown complexion. They live by hunting and fishing. They use bows and arrows and are excellent marksmen. The women, whose features are rather disagreeable, are employed in making fishing-lines, or in gathering grain, which they grind upon a stone. The people were willing to assist the English in filling water, and would supply them with whatever they could get; they were a very honest people, and would not take the least thing without permission."

Such were the aborigines of California. Captain Woodes Rogers did not hesitate to take whatever he could lay his hands on. He captured the "great Manila ship," as the chronicle records. "The prize was called Nuestra Señora de la Incarnacion, commanded by Sir John Pichberty, a gallant Frenchman. The prisoners said that the cargo in India amounted to two millions of dollars. She carried one hundred and ninety-three men, and mounted twenty guns."

The exact locality of Drake's Bay was for years a vexed question. So able an authority as Alexander von Humboldt says: "The port of San Francisco is frequently confounded by geographers with the Port of Drake, farther north, under 38° 10' of latitude, called by the Spaniards the Puerto de Bodega."

The truth is, Bodega Bay lies some miles north of Drake's Bay—or Jack's Harbor, as the sailors call it; the latter, according to the log of the Admiral, may be found in latitude 37° 59' 5"; longitude 122° 57-1/2'. The cliffs about Drake's Bay resemble in height and color, those of Great Britain in the English Channel at Brighton and Dover; therefore it seems quite natural that Sir Francis should have called the land New Albion. As for the origin of the name California, some etymologists contend that it is derived from two Latin words: calida fornax; or, as the Spanish put it, caliente fornalla,—a hot furnace. Certainly it is hot enough in the interior, though the coast is ever cool. The name seems to have been applied to Lower California between 1535 and 1539. Mr. Edward Everett Hale rediscovered in 1862 an old printed romance in which the name California was, before the year 1520, applied to a fabulous island that lay near the Indus and likewise "very near the Terrestrial Paradise." The colonists under Cortez were perhaps the first to apply it to Lower California, which was long thought to be an island.

The name San Francisco was given to a port on the California coast for the first time by Cermeñon, who ran ashore near Point Reyes, or in Drake's Bay, when voyaging from the Philippines in 1595. At any rate, the name was not given to the famous bay that now bears it before 1769, and until that date it was unknown to the world. It is not true, as some have conjectured, that the name San Francisco was given to any port in memory of Sir Francis Drake. Spanish Catholics gave the name in honor of St. Francis of Assisi. Drake was an Englishman and a freebooter, who had no love for the saints.

That the Bay of San Francisco should have so long remained undiscovered is the more remarkable inasmuch as many efforts were made to survey and settle the coast. California was looked upon as the El Dorado of New Spain. It was believed that it abounded in pearls, gold, silver, and other metals; and even in diamonds and precious stones. Fruitless expeditions, private or royal, set forth in 1615, 1633 and 1634; 1640, 1642 and 1648; 1665 and 1668. But nothing came of these. A hundred years later the Spanish friars established their peaceful missions, and in 1776 the mission church of San Francisco was dedicated.

ATOP O' TELEGRAPH HILL

ERHAPS it is a mile wide, that Golden Gate; and it is more bronze than golden. A fort was on our right hand; one of those dear old brick blockhouses that were formidable in their day, but now are as houses of cards. Drop one shell within its hollow, and there will be nothing and no one left to tell the tale.

Down the misty coast, beyond the fort, was Point Lobos—a place where wolves did once inhabit; farther south lie the semi-tropics and the fragrant orange lands; while on our left, to the north, is Point Bonita—pretty enough in the sunshine,—and thereabout is Drake's Bay. Behind us, dimly outlined on the horizon, the Farallones lie faintly blue, like exquisite cloud-islands. The north shore of the entrance to the Bay was rather forbidding,—it always is. The whole California shore line is bare, bleak, and unbeautiful. It is six miles from the Golden Gate to the sea-wall of San Francisco. There was no sea-wall in those days.

We were steaming directly east, with the Pacific dead astern. Beyond the fort were scantily furnished hill-slopes. That quadrangle, with a long row of low white houses on three sides of it, is the presidio—the barracks; a lorner or lonelier spot it were impossible to picture. There were no trees there, no shrubs; nothing but grass, that was green enough in the rainy winter season but as yellow as straw in the drouth of the long summer. Beyond the presidio were the Lagoon and Washerwoman's Bay. Black Point was the extremest suburb in the early days; and beyond it Meigg's Wharf ran far into the North Bay, and was washed by the swift-flowing tide.

San Francisco has as many hills as Rome. The most conspicuous of these stands at the northeast corner of the town; it is Telegraph Hill, upon whose brawny shoulder stood the first home we knew in the young Metropolis. After rounding Telegraph Hill, we saw all the city front, and it was not much to see: a few wooden wharves crowded with shipping and backed by a row of one or two-story frame buildings perched upon piles. The harbor in front of the city—more like an open roadstead than a harbor, for it was nearly a dozen miles to the opposite shore—was dotted with sailing-vessels of almost every description, swinging at anchor, and making it a pretty piece of navigation to pick one's way amongst them in safety.

As the John L. Stevens approached her dock we saw that an immense crowd had gathered to give us welcome. The excitement on ship and shore was very great. After a separation of perhaps years, husbands and wives and families were about to be reunited. Our joy was boundless; for we soon recognized our father in the waiting, welcoming throng. But there were many whose disappointment was bitter indeed when they learned that their loved ones were not on board. Often a ship brought letters instead of the expected wife and family; for at the last moment some unforeseen circumstance may have prevented the departure of the one so looked for and so longed for. In the confusion of landing we nearly lost our wits, and did not fully recover them until we found ourselves in our own new home in the then youngest State in the Union.

How well I remember it all! We were housed on Union Street, between Montgomery and Kearny Streets, and directly opposite the public school—a pretentious building for that period, inasmuch as it was built of brick that was probably shipped around Cape Horn. California houses, such as they were, used to come from very distant parts of the globe in the early Fifties; some of them were portable, and had been sent across the sea to be set up at the purchaser's convenience. They could be pitched like tents on the shortest possible notice, and the fact was evident in many cases.

Our house—a double one of modest proportions—was of brick, and I think the only one on our side of the street for a considerable distance. There was a brick house over the way, on the corner of Montgomery Street, with a balcony in front of it and a grocery on the ground-floor. That grocery was like a country store: one could get anything there; and from the balcony above there was a wonderful view. Indeed that was one of the jumping-off places; for a steep stairway led down the hill to the dock two hundred feet below. As for our neighbors, they dwelt in frame houses, one or two stories in height; and his was the happier house that had a little strip of flowery-land in front of it, and a breathing space in the rear.

The school—our first school in California—backed into the hill across the street from us. The girls and the boys had each an inclosed space for recreation. It could not be called a playground, for there was no ground visible. It was a platform of wood heavily timbered beneath and fenced in; from the front of it one might have cast one's self to the street below, at the cost of a broken bone or two. In those days more than one leg was fractured by an accidental fall from a soaring sidewalk.

Above and beyond the school-house Telegraph Hill rose a hundred feet or more. Our street marked the snow-line, as it were; beyond it the Hill was not inhabited save by flocks of goats that browsed there all the year round, and the herds of boys that gave them chase, especially of a holiday. The Hill was crowned by a shanty that had seen its best days. It had been the lookout from the time when the Forty-Niners began to watch for fresh arrivals. From the observatory on its roof—a primitive affair—all ships were sighted as they neared the Golden Gate, and the glad news was telegraphed by a system of signals to the citizens below. Not a day, not an hour, but watchful eyes sought that signal in the hope of reading there the glad tidings that their ship had come.

The Hill sloped suddenly, from the signal station, on every side. On the north and east it terminated abruptly in artificial cliffs of a dizzy height. The rocks had been blasted from their bases to make room for a steadily increasing commerce, and the débris was shipped away as ballast in the vessels that were chartered to bring passengers and provision to the coast, and found nothing in the line of freight to carry from it.

Upon those northern and eastern slopes of the Hill a few venturesome cottagers had built their nests. The cottages were indeed nestlike: they were so small, so compact, so cosy, so overrun with vines and flowering foliage. Usually of one story, or of a story and a half at most, they clung to the hillside facing the water, and looking out upon its noble expanse from tiny balconies as delicate and dainty as toys. Their garden-plots were set on end; they must needs adapt themselves to the angle of demarkation; they loomed above their front-yards while their back-yards lorded it over their roofs. Indeed they were usually approached by ascending or descending stairways, or perchance by airy bridges that spanned little gullies where ran rivulets in the winter season; and they were a trifle dangerous to encounter after dark. There were parrots on perches at the doorways of those cottages; and song-birds in cages that were hidden away in vines. There were pet poodles there. I think there were more lap-dogs than watch-dogs in that early California.

And there were pleasant people within those hanging gardens,—people who seemed to have drifted there and were living their lyrical if lonely lives in semi-solitude on islands in the air. I always envied them. I was sorry that we were housed like other folk, and fronted on a street than which nothing could have been more commonplace or less interesting. Its one redeeming feature in my eyes was its uncompromising steepness; nothing that ran on wheels ever ran that way, but toiled painfully to the top, tacking from side to side, forever and forever, all the way up.

Weary were the beasts of burden that ascended that hill of difficulty. There was the itinerant marketer, with his overladen cart, and his white horse, very much winded. He was a Yorkshire man, and he cried with a loud voice his appetizing wares: "Cabbage, taters, onions, wild duck, wild goose!" Well do I remember the refrain. Probably there were few domestic fowls in the market then; moreover, even our drinking water was peddled about the streets and sold to us by the huge pailful.

The goats knew Saturday and Sunday by heart. Every Saturday we lads were busier than bees. We had at intervals during the week collected what empty tin cans we might have chanced upon, and you may be sure they were not a few. The markets of California, in early times, were stocked with canned goods. Flour came to us in large cans; probably the barrel would not have been proof against mould during the long voyage around the Horn. Everything eatable—I had almost said and drinkable—we had in cans; and these cans when emptied were cast into the rubbish heap and finally consigned to the dump-cart.

We boys all became smelters, and for a very good reason. There was a market for soft solder; we could dispose of it without difficulty; we could in this way put money in our purse and experience the glorious emotion awakened by the spirit of independence. With our own money, earned in the sweat of our brows—it was pretty hot work melting the solder out of the old cans and moulding it in little pig-leads of our own invention,—we could do as we pleased and no questions asked. Oh, it was a joy past words,—the kindling of the furnace fires, the adjusting of the cans, the watching for the first movement of the melting solder! It trickled down into the ashes like quicksilver, and there we let it cool in shapeless masses; then we remelted it in skillets (usually smuggled from the kitchen for that purpose), and ran the fused metal into the moulds; and when it had cooled we were away in haste to dispose of it.

Some of us became expert amateur metallists, and made what we looked upon as snug little fortunes; yet they did not go far or last us long. The smallest coin in circulation was a dime. No one would accept a five-cent piece. As for coppers, they are scarcely yet in vogue. Money was made so easily and spent so carelessly in the early days the wonder is that any one ever grew rich.

A quarter of a dollar we called two "bits." If we wished to buy anything the price of which was one bit and we had a dime in our pocket, we gave the dime for the article, and the bargain was considered perfectly satisfactory. If we had no dime, we gave a quarter of a dollar and received in change a dime; we thus paid fifty per cent more for the article than we should have done if we had given a dime for it. But that made no difference: a quarter called for two bits' worth of anything on sale. A dime was one bit, but two dimes were not two bits; and it was only a very mean person—in our estimation—who would change his half dollar into five dimes and get five bits' worth of goods for four bits' worth of silver.

PAVEMENT PICTURES

E had been but a few days in San Francisco when a new-found friend, scarcely my senior, but who was a comparatively old settler, took me by the hand and led me forth to view the town. He was my neighbor, and a right good fellow, with the surprising composure—for one of his years—that is so early, so easily, and so naturally acquired by those living in camps and border-lands.

We descended Telegraph Hill by Dupont Street as far as Pacific Street. So steep was the way that, at intervals, the modern fire-escape would have been a welcome aid to our progress. Sidewalks, always of plank and often not broader than two boards placed longitudinally, led on to steps that plunged headlong from one terrace to another. From the veranda of one house one might have leaped to the roof of the house just below—if so disposed,—for the houses seemed to be set one upon another, so acute was the angle of their base-line. The town stood on end just there, and at the foot of it was a foreign quarter.

In those days there were at least four foreign quarters—Spanish, French, Italian, and Chinese. We knew the Spanish Quarter at the foot of the hill by the human types that inhabited it; by the balconies like hanging gardens, clamorous with parrots; and by the dark-eyed senoritas, with lace mantillas drawn over their blue-black hair; by the shop windows filled with Mexican pottery; the long strings of cardinal-red peppers that swung under the awnings over the doors of the sellers of spicy things; and also by the delicious odors that were wafted to us from the tables where Mexicans, Spaniards, Chilians, Peruvians, and Hispano-Americans were discussing the steaming tamal, the fragrant frijol, and other fiery dishes that might put to the blush the ineffectual pepper-pot.

Everywhere we heard the most mellifluous of languages—the "lovely lingo," we used to call it; everywhere we saw the people of the quarter lounging in doorways or windows or on galleries, dressed as if they were about to appear in a rendition of the opera of "The Barber of Seville," or at a fancy-dress ball. Figaros were on every hand, and Rosinas and Dons of all degrees. At times a magnificent Caballero dashed by on a half-tamed bronco. He rode in the shade of a sombrero a yard wide, crusted with silver embroidery. His Mexican saddle was embossed with huge Mexican dollars; his jacket as gaily ornamented as a bull-fighter's; his trousers open from the hip, and with a chain of silver buttons down their flapping hems; his spurs, huge wheels with murderous spikes, were fringed with little bells that jangled as he rode,—and this to the accompaniment of much strumming of guitars and the incense of cigarros.

Near the Spanish Quarter ran the Barbary Coast. There were the dives beneath the pavement, where it was not wise to enter; blood was on those thresholds, and within hovered the shadow of death. Beyond, we entered Chinatown, as rare a bit of old China as is to be found without the Great Wall itself. Chinatown has grown amazingly within the last forty years, but it has in reality gained little in interest. There is more of it: that is the only difference; and what there is of it is more difficult of approach. The Joss House, the theatre, with its great original "continuous performance"—its tragedy half a year in length,—flourished there. The glittering, spectacular restaurant was wide open to the public, and so was everything else. That fact made all the difference between Chinatown in the Fifties and Chinatown forty years later.

My companion and I tarried long on Dupont Street, between Pacific and Sacramento Streets. The shops were like peep shows on a larger scale. How bright they were! how gay with color! how rich with carvings and curios. Each was like a set-scene on the stage. The shopkeepers and their aids were like actors in a play. They seemed really to be playing and not trying to engage in any serious business. Surely it would have been quite beneath the dignity of such distinguished gentlemen to take the smallest interest in the affairs of trade. They were clad in silks and satins and furs of great value; they had a little finger-nail as long as a slice of quill pen; they had tea on tables of carved teak; and they had impossible pipes that breathed unspeakable odors. They wore bracelets of priceless jade. They had private boxes, which hung from the ceiling and looked like cages for some unclassified bird; and they could go up into those boxes when life at the tea-table became tiresome, and get quite another point of view. There they could look down upon the world of traffic that never did anything in their shops, as far as we could see; and, still murmuring to themselves in a tongue that sounds untranslatable and a voice that was never known to rise above a stage whisper, they could at one and the same moment regard with scorn the Christian, keep an eye on the cash-boy, and make perfect pictures of themselves.