then a citizen of San Francisco--one of the three hundred
thousand,--when I read in "The Handbook of Monterey" these lines: "San
Francisco is not too firmly fixed to fear the competition of Monterey"?

Well, I may as well confess myself a false prophet. The town fell into
the hands of Croesus, and straightway lost its identity. It is now a
fashionable resort, and likely to remain one for some years to come.
Where now can one look for the privacy of old? Then, if one wished to
forget the world, he drove through a wilderness to Cypress Point. Now
'tis a perpetual picnic ground, and its fastnesses are threaded by a
drive which is one of the features of Del Monte Hotel life. It was
solemn enough of yore. The gaunt trees were hung with funereal mosses;
they had huge elbows and shoulders, and long, thin arms, with skeleton
fingers at the ends of them, that bore knots that looked like heads and
faces such as Dore portrayed in his fantastic illustrations. They were
like giants transformed,--they are still, no doubt; for the tide of
fashion is not likely to prevail against them.

They stand upon the verge of the sea, where they have stood for ages,
defying the elements. The shadows that gather under their locked
branches are like caverns and dungeons and lairs. The fox steals
stealthily away as you grope among the roots, that writhe out of the
earth and strike into it again, like pythons in a rage. The coyote sits
in the edge of the dusk, and cries with a half-human cry--at least he
did in my dead day. And here are corpse-like trees, that have been naked
for ages; every angle of their lean, gray boughs seems to imply
something. Who will interpret these hieroglyphics? Blood-red sunsets
flood this haunted wood; there is a sound as of a deep-drawn sigh
passing through it at intervals. The moonlight fills it with mystery;
and along its rocky front, where the sea-flowers blossom and the
sea-grass waves its glossy locks, the soul of the poet and of the artist
meet and mingle between shadowless sea and cloudless sky, in the
unsearchable mystery of that cypress solitude.

So have I seen it; so would I see it again. When I think on that beach
at Monterey--the silent streets, the walled, unweeded gardens--a wistful
Saturday-afternoon feeling comes over me. I hear again the incessant
roar of the surf; I see the wheeling gulls, the gray sand; the brown,
bleak meadows; the empty streets; the shops, tenantless sometimes--for
the tenant is a