Oriental fashion hanging fouled in Western telegraph-wires, its flights

of paper prayers which the trade-wind hunts and dissipates along

Western gutters. I was a frequent wanderer on North Beach, gazing at

the straits, and the huge Cape-Horners creeping out to sea, and imminent

Tamalpais. Thence, on my homeward way, I might visit that strange and

filthy shed, earth-paved and walled with the cages of wild animals and

birds, where at a ramshackle counter, amid the yells of monkeys, and a

poignant atmosphere of menagerie, forty-rod whiskey was administered by

a proprietor as dirty as his beasts. Nor did I even neglect Nob

Hill, which is itself a kind of slum, being the habitat of the mere

millionnaire. There they dwell upon the hill-top, high raised above

man's clamour, and the trade-wind blows between their palaces about

deserted streets.

But San Francisco is not herself only. She is not only the most

interesting city in the Union, and the hugest smelting-pot of races and

the precious metals. She keeps, besides, the doors of the Pacific, and

is the port of entry to another world and an earlier epoch in man's

history. Nowhere else shall you observe (in the ancient phrase) so many

tall ships as here convene from round the Horn, from China, from Sydney,

and the Indies; but scarce remarked amid that crowd of deep-sea giants,

another class of craft, the Island schooner, circulates: low in the

water, with lofty spars and dainty lines, rigged and fashioned like

a yacht, manned with brown-skinned, soft-spoken, sweet-eyed native

sailors, and equipped with their great double-ender boats that tell a

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