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 craft 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 or even the newspaper press, save for the line in the
clearing column, "Schooner So-and-so for Yap and South Sea
Islands"--steal out with nondescript cargoes of tinned salmon, gin,
bolts of gaudy cotton stuff, women's hats, and Waterbury watches, to
return, after a year, piled as high as to the eaves of the house with
copra, or wallowing deep with the shells of the tortoise or the pearl
oyster. To me, in my character of the Amateur Parisian, this island
traffic, and even the island world, were beyond the bounds of curiosity,
and how much more of knowledge. I stood there on the extreme shore of
the West and of to-day. Seventeen hundred years ago, and seven thousand
miles to the east, a legionary stood, perhaps, upon the wall of
Antoninus, and looked northward toward the mountains of the Picts. For
all the interval of time and space, I, when I looked from the
cliff-house on the broad Pacific, was that man's heir and analogue: each
of us standing on the verge of the Roman Empire (or, as we now call it,
Western civilisation), each of us gazing onwards into zones unromanised.
But I was dull. I looked rather backward, keeping a kind eye on Paris;
and it required a series of converging incidents to change my attitude
of nonchalance for one of interest, and even longing, which I little
dreamed that I should live to gratify.

The first of these incidents brought me in acquaintance with a certain
San Francisco character, who had something of a name beyond t