ses painted gray,
with here and there a white one, or a glass conservatory front. But
the fog and dust all summer gray these, too, and when the trade-winds
blow hard it takes the smoke out over the east bay, and makes that as
gray as the city.

And yet the city doesn't look sad. The sky is too blue, and the bay is
too blue around it; and the flying fog, and the wind, and the strong
tide flowing in and out of the bay are like restless, eager creatures
that never sleep or grow tired. When I was a very little child the
fierceness of it frightened me. All the noises of the city made one
harsh, threatening voice to my ears; and the perilous water
encompassing far as eye could reach; and the high hills running up into
the sky now blinded by dust, now buried in fog, now drenched in rain,
were overpowering and terrifying to me. Beyond that general seeming of
terror there is little I remember of the early city, except the glimmer
of white tent tops against gray fog or blue water, the loud voices in
the streets, and a vague, general impression of rapid and violent
changes of place and circumstance. Through their confusion three
figures only, move with any clearness,--my tall, teasing, father, my
grim nurse Abby, and my pale-haired mother. Indeed, the first distinct
incident that stands forth from that dim background is the death of my
mother.

It was a puzzle for a child. One day she was there, ill in bed, but
visible, palpable, able to speak, to smile, to kiss,--the next, she had
disappeared. They said she had gone away, but I knew that was
nonsense; for when people went away it was in the daytime with bags and
umbrellas, and every one knew they were going, and where they went, but
with my mother it was different. One day she was there,--the next she
was not, nor in any of the rooms of the house could she be found. It
was long before I ceased to expect her back; long before I ceased, by
some process of child's reasoning, to blame her departure on the gray
unaccountable city. For as early as I can recall a coherent sequence
of impressions the city appeared to me strange and unaccountable.
There was a secret shut away from me behind every closed house front;
the eucalyptus trees seemed to whisper "mystery" above my head; and at
night, when the fog came heaping in, thicker than feather-beds, across
the Mission, and streaming down the long hills on the heels of the
wind, it brought an army of ghosts to inhabit the dark