coloured political caricatures; or (entering in) hold high debate with
some ear-ringed fisher of the bay as to the designs of "Mr. Owstria" and
"Mr. Rooshia." I was often to be observed (had there been any to observe
me) in that dis-peopled, hill-side solitude of Little Mexico, with its
crazy wooden houses, endless crazy wooden stairs, and perilous mountain
goat-paths in the sand. Chinatown by a thousand eccentricities drew
and held me; I could never have enough of its ambiguous, interracial
atmosphere, as of a vitalised museum; never wonder enough at its
outlandish, necromantic-looking vegetables set forth to sell in
commonplace American shop-windows, its temple doors open and the scent
of the joss-stick streaming forth on the American air, its kites of
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
tale of boisterous sea-beaches. These steal out and in again, unnoted by
the world