e, though not
perhaps of what was more generally characteristic of San Francisco.

I had been there a week--an idle week, spent in listless outlook for
employment; a full week in my eager absorption of the strange life
around me and a photographic sensitiveness to certain scenes and
incidents of those days, which start out of my memory to-day as freshly
as the day they impressed me.

One of these recollections is of "steamer night," as it was called,--the
night of "steamer day,"--preceding the departure of the mail steamship
with the mails for "home." Indeed, at that time San Francisco may be
said to have lived from steamer day to steamer day; bills were made due
on that day, interest computed to that period, and accounts settled.
The next day was the turning of a new leaf: another essay to fortune,
another inspiration of energy. So recognized was the fact that even
ordinary changes of condition, social and domestic, were put aside until
AFTER steamer day. "I'll see what I can do after next steamer day" was
the common cautious or hopeful formula. It was the "Saturday night" of
many a wage-earner--and to him a night of festivity. The thoroughfares
were animated and crowded; the saloons and theatres full. I can recall
myself at such times wandering along the City Front, as the business
part of San Francisco was then known. Here the lights were burning all
night, the first streaks of dawn finding the merchants still at their
counting-house desks. I remember the dim lines of warehouses lining the
insecure wharves of rotten piles, half filled in--that had ceased to
be wharves, but had not yet become streets,--their treacherous yawning
depths, with the uncertain gleam of tarlike mud below, at times still
vocal with the lap and gurgle of the tide. I remember the weird stories
of disappearing men found afterward imbedded in the ooze in which they
had fallen and gasped their life away. I remember the two or three
ships, still left standing where they were beached a year or two before,
built in between warehouses, their bows projecting into the roadway.
There was the dignity of the sea and its boundless freedom in their
beautiful curves, which the abutting houses could not destroy, and even
something of the sea's loneliness in the far-spaced ports and cabin
windows lit up by the lamps of the prosaic landsmen who plied their
trades behind them. One of these ships, transformed into a hotel,
retained its name, the Niantic, and part