of its characteristic interior
unchanged. I remember these ships' old tenants--the rats--who had
increased and multiplied to such an extent that at night they fearlessly
crossed the wayfarer's path at every turn, and even invaded the gilded
saloons of Montgomery Street. In the Niantic their pit-a-pat was met
on every staircase, and it was said that sometimes in an excess of
sociability they accompanied the traveler to his room. In the early
"cloth-and-papered" houses--so called because the ceilings were not
plastered, but simply covered by stretched and whitewashed cloth--their
scamperings were plainly indicated in zigzag movements of the sagging
cloth, or they became actually visible by finally dropping through the
holes they had worn in it! I remember the house whose foundations were
made of boxes of plug tobacco--part of a jettisoned cargo--used instead
of more expensive lumber; and the adjacent warehouse where the trunks of
the early and forgotten "forty-niners" were stored, and--never claimed
by their dead or missing owners--were finally sold at auction. I
remember the strong breath of the sea over all, and the constant onset
of the trade winds which helped to disinfect the deposit of dirt and
grime, decay and wreckage, which were stirred up in the later evolutions
of the city.

Or I recall, with the same sense of youthful satisfaction and unabated
wonder, my wanderings through the Spanish Quarter, where three centuries
of quaint customs, speech, and dress were still preserved; where the
proverbs of Sancho Panza were still spoken in the language of Cervantes,
and the high-flown illusions of the La Manchian knight still a part
of the Spanish Californian hidalgo's dream. I recall the more modern
"Greaser," or Mexican--his index finger steeped in cigarette stains;
his velvet jacket and his crimson sash; the many-flounced skirt and lace
manta of his women, and their caressing intonations--the one musical
utterance of the whole hard-voiced city. I suppose I had a boy's
digestion and bluntness of taste in those days, for the combined odor of
tobacco, burned paper, and garlic, which marked that melodious breath,
did not affect me.

Perhaps from my Puritan training I experienced a more fearful joy in the
gambling saloons. They were the largest and most comfortable, even as
they were the most expensively decorated rooms in San Francisco. Here
again the gravity and decorum which I have already alluded to were
present at t