Francisco--that the
sea and forest come straight to its borders. And as, because of its
peninsula situation they form the only roads out, sea and forest are
integral parts of the city life. It accounts for the fact that you see
no city pallor in the faces on the streets and perhaps for the fact that
you see so little unhappiness on them. On Sundays and holidays, crowds
pour across the bay all day long and then, loaded with flowers and
greens, pour back all the evening long. As for flowers and greens, the
hotels, shops, cafes, the little hole-in-the-wall restaurants are full
of them. They are so cheap on the streets that everybody wears them.
Everybody seems to play as much as possible out of doors. Everybody
seems to sleep out of doors. Everybody has just come from a hike or is
just going off on one. Imagine a climate rainless three-quarters of the
year, which permits the workingman to tramp all through his vacation
with the impedimenta only of a blanket, moneyless if he will, but with
the certainty always that the orchards and gardens will provide-him with
food.

Through the city runs one central hill-spine. From this crest, by day,
you look on one side across the bay with its three beautiful islands,
bare Yerba Buena, jeweled Alcatraz and softly-fluted Angel Island, all
seemingly adrift in the blue waters, to Marin county. The waters of the
bay are as smooth as satin, as blue as the sky, and they are slashed
in every direction with the silver wakes left by numberless ferryboats.
Those ferryboats, by the way, are extremely graceful; they look like
white peacocks dragging enormous white-feather tails. By night the
bay view from the central hill-spine shows the cities of Berkeley and
Oakland like enormous planes of crystal tilted against the distance, the
ferryboats illuminated but still peacock-shaped, floating on the black
waters like monster toys of Venetian glass. In the background, rising
from low hills, peaks the blue triangle of Mt. Diablo. In the foreground
reposes Tamalpais--a mountain shaped in the figure of a woman-lying
prone. The wooded slopes of Tamalpais form the nearest big playground
for San Franciscans--and Tamalpais is to the San Franciscan what
Fujiyama is to the Japanese. Would that I had space to tell here of
the time when their mountain caught fire and thousands--men, women and
children--turned out to save it! Everybody helped who could. Even the
bakers of San Francisco worked all night and withou