NOTES OF AN AMERICAN TOUR. 
233 
and advantage to travellers, and the tickets can be obtained a 
long time previously, even available for any time during the 
year. 
A great curiosity in San Francisco is the Chinese quarter, 
a portion entirely occupied by Chinese, and singularly 
situated in the immediate neighbourhood of the best parts of 
the city. The Chinese are very numerous in San Francisco, 
and also in many other parts of California; Chinamen do the 
house work in the hotels instead of chambermaids and house¬ 
maids. The Chinese are very steady, industrious, and 
careful, and Chinese washermen do all the washing and 
laundry work in California and the neighbouring States. 
A sea-side place close to Golden Gate is a favourite resort 
of the San Francisco people, where there are the celebrated 
Seal Rocks; rocks near to the shore swarming with seals, 
which are strictly preserved as a great attraction for visitors. 
The climate of San Francisco is very mild and equable, free 
from both the cold of winter and the heat of summer. 
From San Francisco a visit was paid to the Cloverdale 
Hot Springs and the Calistoga Petrified Forest, about 100 
miles north. The Petrified Forest is a remarkable example 
of silicified trees, which are found lying nearly horizontal at 
or near the surface of the ground, and one very fine specimen 
of a tree is sixty feet in length and eleven feet in diameter 
at the base. 
San Francisco is, like New York, cut off by water from 
the railways of the main land, which start from Oaklands on 
the opposite shore of the bay; and the traffic is all ferried 
across. Also the trains at Benicia, thirty miles distance, after 
starting, have to cross an inner arm of the bay, and each 
train is then conve 3 T ed over bodily, engine and all, by the 
largest ferry boat in the world ; it has lines of railway 
running the whole length of the deck, and the first half of 
the train runs direct on to one line on the boat with the 
engine at the head, and then the second half is pushed on to 
a second line of railway on the deck by a pilot engine at the 
tail end. The pilot engine takes the voyage across with the 
train, and on arrival at the opposite shore, the train engine 
runs off with its half of the train, and the pilot engine runs 
after it with its second half, which is then coupled up again, 
and away the train goes. The whole time occupied in cross¬ 
ing the two miles of water and shunting the train at each 
side is only twenty minutes from arrival at the one side to 
starting from the other side. 
The railway in passing eastward rises very rapidly towards 
the mountains, having as much as 7,000 feet rise in the first 
