XVII. 

 #a an(\ aroun^ ^clfl iJraacix^co, 



ZT is not of the San Francisco of the present I would 

 speak. Were I to, in view of the many annual excur- 

 sionists from the East who bring back oral and 

 written descriptions thereof, I would be the proper recipient 

 of the peculiar words of desistance which the supple tongues 

 of our people lap out of our plastic language. I would speak 

 of the San Francisco of the past, when a good part of its 

 foundations were swashed by the waters of the bay they arose 

 from ; before cable cars were thought of, and the " Nobs " had 

 peopled '' Nob Hill ; " when the city was badly lighted, and, 

 for want of works, water was peddled about the town in huge 

 hogsheads on wheels ; when the foreign element was large, and 

 the vigilantes had just finished purifying the moral atmos- 

 phere of the metropolis. Or that more distant time, the 

 pastoral age of California, when a chain of missions extended 

 from San Francisco on the north to San Diego on the south, 

 peopled with converted Indians and surrounded by the flocks 

 and herds they cared for. Or earlier still, when Drake's 

 clumsy ship came riding through the Golden Gate, the object 

 of the attention of groups of deer on the headlands, or dread 

 of the fleeing natives, while the buccaneer sailors gazed with 

 rapture on the scene before them. 



(252) 



