er Telegraph Hill, had built as they
listed and with little regard for streets, and their houses hung
crazily on a side hill which was little less than a precipice. For the
most part, the Chinese, although they occupied an abandoned business
district, had remade the houses Chinese fashion, and the Mexicans and
Spaniards had added to their houses those little balconies without
which life is not life to a Spaniard.

Yet the most characteristic thing after all was the coloring. For the
sea fog had a trick of painting every exposed object a sea gray which
had a tinge of dull green in it. This, under the leaden sky of a San
Francisco morning, had a depressing effect on first sight and
afterward became a delight to the eye. For the color was soft, gentle
and infinitely attractive in mass.

The hills are steep beyond conception. Where Vallejo street ran up
Russian Hill it progressed for four blocks by regular steps like a
flight of stairs. It is unnecessary to say that no teams ever came up
this street or any other like it, and grass grew long among the paving
stones until the Italians who live thereabouts took advantage of this
to pasture a cow or two. At the end of the four blocks, the pavers had
given it up and the last stage to the summit was a winding path. On
the very top, a colony of artists lived in little villas of houses
whose windows got the whole panorama of the bay. Luckily for these
people, a cable car climbed the hill on the other side, so that it was
not much of a climb to home.

With these hills, with the strangeness of the architecture and with
the green gray tinge over everything, the city fell always into vistas
and pictures, a setting for the romance which hung over everything,
which always hung over life in San Francisco since the padres came and
gathered the Indians about Mission Dolores.

And it was a city of romance and a gateway to adventure. It opened
out on the mysterious Pacific, the untamed ocean, and most of China,
Japan, the South Sea Islands, Lower California, the west coast of
Central America, Australia that came to this country passed in through
the Golden Gate. There was a sprinkling, too, of Alaska and Siberia.
From his windows on Russian Hill one saw always something strange and
suggestive creeping through the mists of the bay. It would be a South
Sea Island brig, bringing in copra, to take out cottons and idols; a
Chinese junk with fanlike sails, back from an expedition after sharks'