peninsula
projecting west and north from the coast of California. Between that
peninsula and the mainland lies a blue arm of the blue San Francisco
bay. So that when you have bisected the continent and come to what
appears to be the edge of the western world, you must take a ferry to
get to the city itself.

I hope you will cross that bay first at night, for there is no more
romantic hour in which to enter San Francisco; the bay spreading out
back of you a-plash with all kinds of illuminated water craft and the
city lifting up before you ablaze with thousands of pin point lights;
for San Francisco's site is a hilly one and the city lies like a
jewelled mantle thrown carelessly over many peaks. You land at the Ferry
building--surely the most welcoming station in the world--walk through
it, come out at the other side on a circular place which is one end of
Market street, the main artery of the city. If this is by day, you can
see that the other end of Market street is Twin Peaks--a pair of
hills that imprint bare, exquisitely shaped contours of gold on a blue
sky--with the effect somehow of a stage-drop. If you come by night, you
will find Market street crowded with people, lighted with a display of
electric signs second only in size, number, brilliancy and ingenuity to
those on Broadway. But whether you come by day or by night, the instant
you emerge from the Ferry building, San Francisco gets you. Market
street is one of the most entertaining main-traveled urban roads in the
world. Newspaper offices in a cluster, store windows flooded with light,
filled with advertising devices of the most amusing originality, cars,
taxis, crowds, it has all the earmarks of the main street of any big
American city, with the addition, at intervals, of the pretty "islands"
so typical of the boulevards of Paris and with, last of all, a zip and
a zest, a pep and a punch, a go and a ginger that is distinctively
Californian. I repeat that California throws her first tentacle into
your heart as you stand there wondering whether you'll go to your hotel
or, plunging headforemost into the crowds, swim with the current.

Imagine a city built not on seven but a hundred hills. I am sure there
are no less than a hundred and probably there are more. Certainly I
climbed a hundred. On three sides the sea laps the very hem of this city
and on one side the forest reaches down to its very toes. That is, when
all is said, the most marvelous thing about San